MARGARET WARNER: Jim Fotis is executive director of the Law Enforcement Alliance of America, a voluntary organization claiming to represent 50,000 rank and file officers. He’s also a former police officer, himself, in Lindbrook, New York. Hubert Williams is president of the Police Foundation, a private, non-profit research organization. He’s also the former police chief of Newark, New Jersey. Joining them are the chairman and ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Republican Bill McCollum of Florida, who opposed enactment of the Brady law, and Democrat Charles Schumer of New York, one of the law’s original sponsors. Jim Fotis, what do you think will be the impact of this bill now? How is local law enforcement going to react–excuse me–of this ruling.

JIM FOTIS, Law Enforcement Alliance: Well, I think many of your small departments and most people don’t realize that police departments throughout the United States are very small, possibly under 20 people in most of the departments, and what’s going to happen is some of them are going to continue doing background checks. But what we have to look at is the future, as–as Mr. Farnsworth said–

MARGARET WARNER: Taylor.

JIM FOTIS: Excuse me, Taylor–that we have to look at the future. And we have to find–there are 28 states that have some kind of background check now. We have to fund the instant check for the other 22 states, so that law enforcement can get online, not use up their reserves of manpower to sit and look through hand records or sometimes have to call throughout the United States. I think it’s great that the law was struck down as it stands right now. Now we have to move forward and force the administration to fund the second part of the Brady law, the instant check.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: In 1981, when a lone gunman attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, his press secretary, James Brady, was also seriously wounded. The fallout from that shooting and from several other widely publicized shooting incidents brought calls for federal legislation that would require criminal background checks on people who want to buy handguns. After much legislative controversy, a bill named after Brady was signed into law in November of 1993. PRESIDENT CLINTON: It will be step one in taking our streets back, taking our children back, reclaiming our families, and our future.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Under the Brady Bill, states could refuse to sell handguns to anyone indicted or convicted of a felony, and to those who had ever had a restraining order placed against them. The work of checking those backgrounds was given to state and local chief law enforcement officers. They were required to review the forms within five days, destroy applications of those declared eligible, and inform in writing those who were denied. But at the Graham County Sheriff’s Department in Arizona, Sheriff Richard Mack said he was too busy to do those jobs.

SHERIFF RICHARD MACK, Graham County, Arizona: We have gun problems here, gang problems here. Am I supposed to know those problems so I can check a criminal background check on someone who’s never committed a wrong in their life? Can’t do it.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Sheriff Mack organized a gun rally to raise money to sue the federal government. He said the requirements were an infringement on states’ rights, a violation of the 10th Amendment, which reserves to the states those powers not specifically given to the federal government in the Constitution.

SHERIFF RICHARD MACK: We cannot allow our constitutional rights to be trampled on like our federal government seems to be trampling on them.

JIM LEHRER: Now, to NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor of the American Lawyer and Legal Times. And, of course, Stuart, the court ruled today in favor of the City of Boerne, right?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: It did.

JIM LEHRER: On what grounds?

STUART TAYLOR: It held that the–this 1993 law exceeded Congress’s power by usurping the authority of the Supreme Court to say what the Constitution means, in this case say what the appropriate portion of the First Amendment protecting the free exercise of religion means and doesn’t mean and also by invading the reserve powers of state and local governments. The specific provision that Congress was relying on as giving it power to try and overturn this prior Supreme Court decision, in essence, was Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, the enforcement clause of this–the 14th Amendment, which incorporates a lot of the provisions of the Bill of Rights. And the court answered one of the big question marks of constitutional law because during the civil rights era the court upheld a lot of fairly far reaching laws, as Congress has broad power to enforce this, and the question has been: Does that power go so far as to let them overturn prior Supreme Court precedents, in effect, and the answer from the court today was pretty clearly no.

JIM LEHRER: And it was clear, was it not, that the majority opinion was written by Justice Kennedy. What did he say? Were the words strong and direct?

JIM LEHRER: Right. Okay. Now, let’s go to some things the court did decide. And another one of those major decisions dealt with whether public schoolteachers can offer remedial help at parochial schools. When that case was argued last April, some of you may remember, Elizabeth Farnsworth prepared this backgrounder.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The children at Sacred Heart Primary School in the South Bronx do a lot of walking. About 100 of the Catholic school’s 900 students participate in remedial education programs. They’re provided for poor students by the federal government in a program called Title I. But because of a 1985 Supreme Court decision remedial classes taught by public school teachers cannot take place inside parochial schools. So the New York City Board of Education parks three vans down the street from Sacred Heart.

The children put on their coats and are escorted from their classrooms by parent volunteers. At the school door they’re met by the van drivers, who help them cross the street and enter the vans. After an hour or sometimes less of instruction, they return to Sacred Heart in two straight lines. Teachers complain the walk to the vans takes time that could be better spent in the classroom.

RON BELLIN, Public School Teacher: The walk here is about a half a block from the school entrance, and so to walk here and back it takes up at least 10 minutes of the instruction time each, for each group. So that mounts up.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The 1985 Supreme Court decision was based on preserving the separation of church and state by keeping public school teachers out of parochial schools. But teachers say that decision has resulted in less than ideal working conditions.

OLIVE TOMLINSON, Public School Teacher: Living in a hot sardine can, praying that you don’t offend the neighbors with the exhaust pipes, trying to make the best of a very annoying situation.

JIM LEHRER: We go first tonight to the Supreme Court decision on majority black districts. The court upheld a Georgia plan which provides for only one such congressional district. More now from NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor of the American Lawyer and Legal Times. Stuart, first give us the story of the case, itself.

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: It really starts in about 1990, with the decennial census that led to redistricting all over the country and in Georgia, because of a population increase, they went from ten to eleven districts, voting districts for Congress. So they had to redraw the whole map. The state legislature under very heavy pressure from the Justice Department, which was–which was enforcing a legal interpretation of the Voting Rights Act that you have to maximize the number of minority majority districts, black majority and Hispanic majority districts, pushed the legislature to have three black majority districts in Georgia, which would be roughly proportionate to the 27 percent black population.

JIM LEHRER: In other words, that’s how it looked. That’s how the districts looked.

STUART TAYLOR: Yes.

JIM LEHRER: Okay.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: The case before the Supreme Court today deals with insider stock trading and who is an insider and who is not. To help us understand that, what difference it makes, and what happened in today’s arguments we have NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor, correspondent for the American Lawyer and Legal Times. And Stuart, as you are best equipped to do, explain in the simplest terms what is insider trading.

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: There’s a big argument about this, but in the usual lay sense, what most people mean, is insider trading would be trading a company’s securities, stocks, bonds, for profit, typically a big profit, based on inside information about that company’s value stolen from somebody. The classic case might be the president of an oil company that’s publicly traded learns that they’ve just scored a huge hit, a new discovery, and the stock’s going to go through the roof in a week when they announce it. And he goes out and buys a bunch of the stock beforehand. He’s stealing his own company’s information from his other shareholders, if you will, for his personal profit.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: It doesn’t matter how he learned it?

STUART TAYLOR: In the usual sense, in the general sense in which I’m defining it, the Supreme Court has said not everything that might be called insider trading, the way I’ve just defined it, is, in fact, barred by the federal securities laws.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Well, let’s don’t go there yet.

STUART TAYLOR: Right.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Let’s continue on where we are. So anybody–did you have another example?

STUART TAYLOR: Well, in this case it’s a little trickier because he didn’t supposedly steal the money from the company whose stock he was trading–and that’s part of what the argument is about–he stole it from another company that was planning a takeover.

JIM LEHRER: Now today’s developments before the Supreme Court and to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: And joining us is the NewsHour’s regular court watcher, Stuart Taylor, correspondent for the "American Lawyer" and "Legal Times." Stuart, first of all, do you agree with what many observers at the court are saying, that this ruling, however it comes down, could be one of the landmark rulings of this term?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: Yes, with a little hedge, certainly because of the vast importance of this new medium. And this is potentially the most important First Amendment case to come before the Supreme Court in I’d say more than 25 years just making new rules for a brand new situation. Whether the court will bring down the kind of ringing declaration that people recognize as a landmark opinion, whether they will produce a splintered thing where you have to sort of get out a chart to figure out how many votes are for which proposition remains to be seen. They may also want to move rather cautiously because you could tell in the argument today this isn’t just a matter of where we’ll take the older precedents and apply them to a new situation. They groping with the technology and with economic situations that are hard to understand, hard for them to understand, hard for a lot of people to understand, and are moving very fast. And I don’t think they want to sort of lay down some rules. They want to look like they were based on a factually inaccurate premise two years from now.

MARGARET WARNER: So we just heard the basic argument between these two partisans, but tell us about the arguments in court today; that is, taking the government first. Which of the arguments that we just heard did the government lawyers try to emphasize in arguing to uphold this law?