The Supreme Court rejected a bid by U.S. residents living in Puerto Rico to claim benefits under a federal insurance program in the case United States v. Vaello Madero.
Justices ruled 8-1 on Thursday, the majority arguing Congress had not violated the Constitution by excluding residents of the U.S. territory from Supplemental Security Income, monthly payments for blind, disabled, or low-income elderly people.
The six-page opinion was authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh and argued Congress was in the right to deny SSI benefits to residents of Puerto Rico because they are exempt from most U.S. taxes. Thursday’s decision affects nearly 300,000 people who would have qualified for the benefit.
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“In devising tax and benefits programs, it is reasonable for Congress to take account of the general balance of benefits to and burdens on the residents of Puerto Rico. In doing so, Congress need not conduct a dollar-to-dollar comparison of how its tax and benefits programs apply in the States as compared to the Territories, either at the individual or collective level,” wrote Kavanaugh, an appointee of former President Donald Trump.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was born in New York and is of Puerto Rican descent, was the lone dissenter in the ruling. She disputed the majority’s standpoint regarding taxes and argued SSI beneficiaries typically have low incomes and usually pay little to no federal income tax.
“Under the current system, the jurisdiction in which an SSI recipient resides has no bearing at all on the purposes or requirements of the SSI program. For this reason alone, it is irrational to tie an individual’s entitlement to SSI to that individual’s place of residency,” wrote Sotomayor, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.
Justice Neil Gorsuch voted to uphold the denial of SSI benefits to Puerto Rico residents but said the so-called insular cases that guided the decision “have no foundation in the Constitution,” going as far as to say they “rest on racial stereotypes.”
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Gorsuch, a Trump appointee who also sided with the liberal wing of the court in a 5-4 decision in 2020 over tribal sovereignty rights in McGirt v. Oklahoma, issued a concurring opinion with Sotomayor. He highlighted the need for the Supreme Court to renounce several cases in the late 1900s that backed the notion that residents of U.S. territories should not have access to all the constitutional rights as the 50 states in the nation.
“The flaws in the Insular Cases are as fundamental as they are shameful,” Gorsuch wrote. “Nothing in the Constitution speaks of ‘incorporated’ and ‘unincorporated’ Territories. Nothing in it extends to the latter only certain supposedly ‘fundamental’ constitutional guarantees. Nothing in it authorizes judges to engage in the sordid business of segregating Territories and the people who live in them on the basis of race, ethnicity, or religion.”
