TENNESSEE v. LANE
Opinion of the Court
(1979). When Congress seeks to remedy or prevent unconstitutional discrimination, § 5 authorizes it to enact prophylactic legislation proscribing practices that are discriminatory in effect, if not in intent, to carry out the basic
objectives of the Equal Protection Clause.
Congress' §5 power is not, however, unlimited. While
Congress must have a wide berth in devising appropriate
remedial and preventative measures for unconstitutional actions, those measures may not work a "substantive change
in the governing law." Boerne, 521 U.S., at 519. In
Boerne, we recognized that the line between remedial legislation and substantive redefinition is "not easy to discern,"
and that "Congress must have wide latitude in determining
where it lies." Id., at 519-520. But we also confirmed that
"the distinction exists and must be observed," and set forth
a test for so observing it: Section 5 legislation is valid if it
exhibits "a congruence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to
that end." Id., at 520.
In Boerne, we held that Congress had exceeded its § 5 authority when it enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration
Act of 1993 (RFRA), 107 Stat. 1488, 42 U. S. C. §2000bb et
seq. We began by noting that Congress enacted RFRA "in
direct response" to our decision in Employment Div., Dept.
of Human Resources of Ore. v. Smith, 494 U. S. 872 (1990),
for the stated purpose of "restor[ing]" a constitutional rule
that Smith had rejected. 521 U. S., at 512, 515 (internal
quotation marks omitted). Though the respondent attempted to defend the statute as a reasonable means of enforcing the Free Exercise Clause as interpreted in Smith,
we concluded that RFRA was "so out of proportion" to that
objective that it could be understood only as an attempt to
work a "substantive change in constitutional protections."
521 U. S., at 529, 532. Indeed, that was the very purpose
of the law.
This Court further defined the contours of Boerne's "congruence and proportionality" test in Florida Prepaid Post-