“Judging The Supreme Court”: A Disturbing Picture, The Court Is Guilty Of Failing To Adequately Enforce The Constitution
After 227 years of history, how should we judge the United States Supreme Court? All of my years of studying, teaching, and practicing Constitutional law have convinced me that the Supreme Court has rarely lived up to lofty expectations and far more often has upheld discrimination and even egregious violations of basic liberties.
My disappointment in the Court is historical and contemporary. Its preeminent task is to enforce the Constitution in the face of majorities that would violate it. The Court is thus especially important in protecting minorities and in safeguarding rights in times of crisis when passions cause society to lose sight of its long-term values.
For the first 78 years of American history until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, the Court enforced the institution of slavery. For 58 years, from 1896 until 1954, the Court embraced the noxious doctrine of separate but equal and approved Jim Crow laws that segregated every aspect of Southern life. Nor are egregious mistakes by the Supreme Court on race a thing of the past. The Roberts Court has furthered racial inequality by striking down efforts of school boards to desegregate schools and by declaring unconstitutional crucial provisions of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Court also has continually failed to stand up to majoritarian pressures in times of crisis. During World War I, individuals were imprisoned for speech that criticized the draft and the war without the slightest evidence that the expression had any adverse effect on military recruitment or the war effort. During World War II, 110,000 Japanese-Americans were uprooted from their lifelong homes and placed in what President Franklin Roosevelt referred to as “concentration camps.”
During the McCarthy era, people were imprisoned simply for teaching works by Marx and Engels, and Lenin. In all of these instances, the Court failed to enforce the Constitution. Most recently, the Roberts Court held that individuals could be criminally punished for advising foreign organizations, designated by the United States government as terrorist organizations, as to how to use the United Nations for peaceful resolution of their disputes or how to receive humanitarian assistance.
For almost 40 years, from the 1890s until 1937, the Court declared unconstitutional more than 200 federal, state, and local laws that were designed to protect workers and consumers. The Court even declared unconstitutional the first federal law designed to prevent child labor by prohibiting the shipment in interstate commerce of goods made by child labor. Minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws were frequently invalidated.
Even the areas of the Supreme Court’s triumphs, like Brown v. Board of Education and Gideon v. Wainwright, accomplished less than it might seem. American public schools remain racially separate and terribly unequal. Criminal defendants in so many parts of the country, including in death-penalty cases, have grossly inadequate lawyers.
The Court’s decisions from the last few years — preventing employment discrimination suits and class actions against large corporations, keeping those injured by misconduct of generic drug makers from having any recovery, denying remedies to those unjustly convicted and detained — illustrate what has historically been true: The Court is far more likely to rule in favor of corporations than workers or consumers; it is far more likely to uphold abuses of government power than to stop them.
What should we do about it?
Some scholars urge the abandonment of judicial review, but I reject that conclusion. The limits of the Constitution are meaningful only if there are courts to enforce them. For those I have represented over my career — prisoners, criminal defendants, homeless individuals, a Guantánamo detainee — it is the courts or nothing.
But I believe that there are many reforms that can make the Court better and, taken together, make it less likely that it will so badly fail in the future. I propose a host of changes, including instituting merit selection of court justices, creating a more meaningful confirmation process, establishing term limits for court justices, changing the Court’s communications (that is, televising its proceedings), and applying ethics rules to the court justices.
The Supreme Court’s decisions affect each of us, often in the most important and intimate aspects of our lives. I think that we need to focus on the Court’s long-term and historical performance. If we do, it is a disturbing picture and there is only one possible verdict: The Court is guilty of failing to adequately enforce the Constitution.
But it can and must get better in the years and decades ahead.
By: Ewin Chemerinsky; The National Memo, January 5, 2014; Originally Posted at The Washington Spectator
“How To Make The Supreme Court More Accountable”: The Most Powerful, Least Accountable Public Institution In The Country
Justice Samuel A. Alito’s sister is a high-powered labor attorney who represents management in disputes with workers. Justice Elena Kagan’s brother, a teacher at an elite public school in New York, has protested the school’s admissions process because of low minority enrollment. And Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s son co-founded a tech company that broadcasts civil court proceedings.
Does having relatives involved in labor disputes, affirmative action battles, and cameras in courtrooms affect how Supreme Court justices decide cases and manage their institution? They say no, and we’re supposed to take them at their word. But is “trust us” really good enough for the nation’s highest court?
A confluence of recent events has made the Supreme Court the most powerful, least accountable public institution in the country. It is time to make the justices more accountable to the American people.
The court rules on wide-ranging issues fundamental to American life — where we can pray, who is eligible to vote and marry, how much regulation businesses should face, and who has access to health insurance. And with Congress gridlocked and relations between the legislative and executive branches at a historic nadir, the court’s opinions are binding and irreversible. So much for checks and balances.
In spite of this vast power, the justices have little accountability. Not only do they decide for themselves when to recuse themselves from cases in which they have conflicts; they also aren’t bound to a code of ethics the way the rest of federal judiciary is. They can decide how much information on investments and travel to release in their annual financial disclosure reports, and they determine when and where people can demonstrate near their building.
Yet for all the flaws and impenetrability at the Supreme Court, the problems could be solved rather quickly. Unlike the consensus required to make changes in Congress, the Supreme Court is largely in charge of its own rules — and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. himself could usher in most of the vital changes needed, including tightening requirements on recusals, requiring the justices to adhere to the Code of Conduct for U.S. judges, posting disclosure reports online, providing advance notice for public appearances and permitting live audio and video in the courtroom.
Roberts has been loath to implement any changes. Years ago when he was asked about the benefits of permitting live broadcasts of oral arguments, Roberts replied, “It’s not our job to educate the public,” as if saying he was comfortable hiding behind the cast-iron doors in perpetuity.
A new organization I’ve launched, Fix the Court, will take on some of what the court should be doing itself. Each week, we release information online about the justices related to five issue areas — recusals, disclosures, ethics, public appearances and media and public access. But public pressure is also needed to encourage the justices to be more transparent.
You may not have known, for example, that Justice Clarence Thomas ruled on Bush v. Gore while his wife was collecting candidates’ resumes to recommend to a new Bush administration. Or that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke at a National Organization for Women conference soon after ruling on a case in which the group had submitted a brief to the court. (Ginsburg sided with NOW in the case.) Or that just last year, Justice Antonin Scalia was part of the court majority siding with anti-abortion advocates who said a Massachusetts law allowing a buffer zone around abortion clinics violated the 1st Amendment — even though his wife had been on the board of a pro-life organization and served as a “crisis counselor” to pregnant women. These are but a few of the examples where the justices may not have exercised proper discretion in hearing a case. There are dozens more.
Mustering public support for reform is the first step, and that shouldn’t be too difficult: Despite the well-documented political divisions across the country, Republicans, Democrats and Independents are united in their desire for a more accountable Supreme Court. Recent polling found that more than 85 percent of Americans of all ideologies support requiring the justices to follow the judicial code of conduct from which they are currently exempt. Large majorities also support cameras in the courtroom and compelling the justices to post disclosure reports online.
The recent elections were a stark reminder of how responsive and accountable Congress and the president can be to the will of the public. Frustrated voters displayed little reluctance sending a message to Washington lawmakers, kicking some out and starting over.
Supreme Court justices, rightly, can’t simply be voted out of office. But the time has come to end the special rules that exempt them from scrutiny by the American public.
By: Gabe Roth, Executive Director of Fix the Court, The Los Angeles Times; The National Memo, December 4, 2014
“More Consequential And Far-Reaching”: Why The Supreme Court Should Be The Biggest Issue Of The 2016 Campaign
Supreme Court justice and pop culture icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg left the hospital yesterday after having a heart stent implanted and expects to be back at work Monday. Despite various health issues over the years, Ginsburg insists that she is still of sound body at age 81 (her mind isn’t in question) and has no plans to retire before the end of President Obama’s term to ensure a Democratic replacement. If she keeps to that pledge, and presuming there are no other retirements in the next two years, the makeup of the Supreme Court could be a bigger campaign issue in 2016 than ever before. It certainly ought to be.
Ordinarily, the Supreme Court is brought up almost as an afterthought in presidential campaigns. The potential for a swing in the court is used to motivate activists to volunteer and work hard, and the candidates usually have to answer a debate question or two about it, which they do in utterly predictable ways (“I’m just going to look for the best person for the job”). We don’t usually spend a great deal of time talking about what a change in the court is likely to mean. But the next president is highly likely to have the chance to engineer a swing in the court. The consequences for Americans’ lives will probably be more consequential and far-reaching than any other issue the candidates will be arguing about.
As much as we’ve debated Supreme Court cases in recent years, we haven’t given much attention to the idea of a shift in the court’s ideology because for so long the court has been essentially the same: divided 5-4, with conservatives having the advantage yet liberals winning the occasional significant victory when a swing justice moves to their side. And though a couple of recent confirmations have sparked controversy (Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor were both the target of failed attempts to derail their nominations), all of the retirements in the last three presidencies were of justices from the same general ideology as the sitting president. The last time a new justice was radically different from the outgoing one was when Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall — 23 years ago.
Whether a Democrat or a Republican wins in 2016, he or she may well have the chance to shift the court’s ideological balance. Ginsburg is the oldest justice at 81; Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy are both 78, and Stephen Breyer is 76. If the right person is elected and the right justice retires, it could be an earthquake.
Consider this scenario: Hillary Clinton becomes president in 2017, and sometime later one of the conservative justices retires. Now there would be a liberal majority on the court, a complete transformation in its balance. A court that now consistently favors those with power, whether corporations or the government, would become much more likely to rule in favor of workers, criminal defendants and those with civil rights claims. Or alternately: The Republican nominee wins, and one of the liberal justices retires. With conservatives in control not by 5-4 but 6-3, there would be a cascade of even more conservative decisions. The overturning of Roe v. Wade would be just the beginning.
Look at what the Supreme Court has done recently. It gutted the Voting Rights Act, said that corporations could have religious beliefs, simultaneously upheld and hobbled the Affordable Care Act, struck down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act and moved toward legalizing same-sex marriage, all but outlawed affirmative action, gave corporations and wealthy individuals the ability to dominate elections and created an individual right to own guns — and that’s just in the last few years.
Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, there is probably no single issue you ought to be more concerned about in the 2016 campaign than what the court will look like after the next president gets the opportunity to make an appointment or two. The implications are enormous. It’s not too early to start considering them.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, November 28, 2014
“There’s No Line Between Law And Politics”: A Reminder; Our Justices Are Politicians In Robes
Linda Greenhouse, the longtime Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, declared surrender Thursday. For decades, she argued that the Court was a higher form of government, engaged in Law, not just politics. Now she has decided that the justices are politicians in robes.
The straw that broke her faith? The Court’s decision to review King v. Burwell, a case confirming that Obamacare subsidies can go to people in insurance exchanges that the federal government sets up in states that haven’t created the exchanges themselves. Without those subsidies, the worst-case scenario has Obamacare entering a fiscal death spiral. The best case is that it would be another body blow to a law that is managing to work despite design flaws and relentless opposition.
Greenhouse is absolutely right that the Court’s hasty grab at a hot-button case it doesn’t need to decide is unseemly and partisan-feeling. And as Greenhouse is a very smart and sincere person who loves the Court and the law, her crie de coeur is striking.
But the Supreme Court has been political since the day it was born. It’s just that the way it is political today is a symptom of the nastiness and futility of our politics.
Cast an eye over the history of the Supreme Court, and you will see no golden age of apolitical judging. Today’s conservative judicial activists—especially the older generation, such as Justices Scalia and Thomas—came onto the Court in reaction against an earlier generation of liberal activists. The liberals had established abortion rights, extended constitutional equality to women, increased the rights of criminal defendants, and briefly declared the death penalty unconstitutional.
The conservatives saw all of this as blatantly political activism. They sought control of the Court to restore the Constitution and protect law from politics—at least as they understood it. Now those conservative restorationists are the partisan activists who have broken Linda Greenhouse’s faith.
And what about those liberal activists who made the young Scalia and Thomas so indignant? They were the children of another revolution. Their predecessors—and some of them—also came onto the Court to restore the Constitution and save the law from politics. Only the activists they overthrew were conservatives: anti-New Deal justices who upheld “economy liberty” and “limited government” by striking down minimum-wage laws and the first wave of Franklin Roosevelt’s legislation.
And so it goes, back through judicial struggles over Reconstruction, slavery, and the now-esoteric bloodletting of the early nineteenth century, which pivoted on questions like the constitutionality of the national bank. Someone has always been trying to save the law from politics and restore the Constitution. But when you look at it clearly, saving the law from politics turns out to be a thoroughly political job.
First you have to convince people to accept your version of the boundary between law and politics. Then you have to get judges onto the bench who agree with you. The history of law is the history of politics, and vice-versa.
So why do so many smart people believe in the difference between law and politics? Why do they sincerely try to restore, or preserve, the line between the two, and get heartbroken when the line fails?
It’s not just naivete. The special role of the American courts, particularly the Supreme Court, is to administer principles that have won so decisively in politics that they get taken off the table.
The triumph of the New Deal brought in a generation of judges who implemented new principles—above all, the legitimacy of the regulatory and welfare state—across the legal system as the shared framework of a national consensus. The era of the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society led a generation of elite liberals, including many of the current Justices, to embrace broader principles of personal liberty and equality, which they saw as perfecting the American social compact. They were busily implementing these in cases like Roe v. Wade when a right-wing insurgency took them by surprise.
The fight that started then has only become more pitched. There’s no line between law and politics now because our politics is too divided to generate one. We cannot begin to agree which issues should be taken off the table and handed to courts.
The conservatives on the Supreme Court are aligned, intellectually, politically, and institutionally, with lawyers and activists who want to dismantle much of the regulatory and welfare state and stop or reverse the extension of civil rights and liberties.
The liberals are aligned with those who have opposite aims: preserving and extending civil rights and upholding the regulatory state as a legitimate aspect of government. The country is divided, sharply and unrelentingly, over the same questions. What one side tries to take off the table, to turn from “politics” into “law,” the other side is always trying to grab back. With every grab, the idea that law and politics are separate becomes harder for anyone to believe.
Politics gives law its premises, its basic commitments. Law has its own kind of integrity, based in applying principles consistently, integrating competing goals, giving the same words the same meaning in different places and explaining why not when it doesn’t. If you have worked closely with judges who practice this craft, you know it isn’t just politics, any more than architecture is just drawing.
Law, in this sense, is essential work, but its fabric gets torn when the premises change—like ripping a weaving project suddenly into a new kind of garment. It changed in the Civil Rights era, and in the New Deal. And then it stabilized. Now it is not stabilizing, and the constant contest at all levels, from basic premises to craft, means that, increasingly, everything feels partisan. All that is solid melts into fetid air.
We’ve been denied what Americans seem perennially to wish for—a Supreme Court that is better than we are—surer, clearer, wiser and more unified. It turns out that was really a wish to be a better version of ourselves. On the one hand, it’s good to be rid of the illusion and stand on the real ground of democratic politics. On the other hand, what broken and disappointing ground it is.
By: Jedediah Purdy, Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at the Duke University School of Law; The Daily Beast, November 13, 2014
“A Cardinal Reality Facing The Justices”: The Supreme Court Is Now A Death Panel
Back in March 2011, when the biggest threats facing Obamacare were the Supreme Court and the 2012 elections, I argued that the demise of the Affordable Care Act would put people’s lives in immediate danger.
At the time, the law had relatively few beneficiaries—people under 26 covered by their parents’ health plans, a small population of people with pre-existing medical conditions. But some of them had already used their new coverage to finance the kinds of life-saving treatments that would leave them in need of chronic care for the rest of their lives. Take away the health law, and most of these organ transplant recipients and other patients would have become unable to afford their medications, and some of them would die.
Since then, millions of people have gained coverage under the law, and that group of chronic care patients has grown much larger. But despite the fact that the Court upheld the law, and President Obama won reelection, the ACA isn’t out of danger.
On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that will determine whether the federal government can continue to subsidize private ACA coverage in states that didn’t set up their own insurance exchanges.
That case is King v. Burwell, but the issue at stake has come to be defined by a comparable case called Halbig v. Burwell.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the challengers in King, but the Supreme Court agreed to grant cert to those challengers anyhow, despite the absence of a Circuit Court split. If the five conservative Supreme Court justices are so inclined, they can void ACA subsidies for millions of beneficiaries, and cripple the insurance markets in about three dozen states.
Some of those beneficiaries will be the kinds of transplant recipients and other patients I wrote about three and a half years ago. Except today there are many more of them. Several of these patients explained the risk to their lives in an amicus brief, urging a different circuit court to reject the challenge to the subsidies, and thus to the viability of the insurance markets their lives depend on.
“Without insurance, Jennifer [Causor’s] treatments would be completely unaffordable. Her transplant cost nearly $280,000. She takes three anti-rejection drugs, one of which has a sticker price of $2,400 per month…. Should she become uninsured, Jennifer would face bankruptcy and even death.”
You can read the whole brief below. Conservatives are brimming with excitement over the Court’s decision to hear the challenge. Should the five conservatives rule that the text of the law doesn’t provide for federal subsidies in states that didn’t set up their own exchanges, they’ll place the onus on Congress or state governments to address the consequences for constituents who lose their benefits. The contested text could be fixed with a comically simple technical corrections bill, which Democrats would happily support. If Republicans were to sit on their hands, or use the ensuing chaos as leverage to extract unrelated concessions, it will cost people their lives. That is a cardinal reality facing justices, and the people soliciting their conservative activism.
There’s an ironic post-script to this article. The Supreme Court is likely to resolve this case with a 5-4 decision, one way or another. Either a single conservative will side with the Court’s four liberals as in 2012, and leave the law unscathed, or the five conservatives will align to void the subsidies.
Under the circumstances, supporters of the law might be nervous about the potential loss of a liberal justice. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s health and advanced age make many liberals very uneasy, especially now that Obama’s ability to fill Supreme Court vacancies has come into doubt. But for the purposes of King, this issue is immaterial.
If Ginsburg’s seat were to become vacant, then the fate of the law would remain in the hands of a conservative swing justice. A 4-4 split effectively upholds the lower court’s ruling—and since the Fourth Circuit upheld the subsidies, the subsidies would stand. If the Fourth Circuit had ruled the other way, her health would be much more material.
When I mentioned this admittedly morbid but nevertheless important curiosity on Twitter, a large number of dimwitted (or in some cases persistently dishonest) conservatives flooded my mentions column in outrage. Most of them missed the meaning altogether, and accused me of wishing death upon a conservative Supreme Court justice. But even the ones who didn’t managed to contain their enthusiasm over the possibility of millions of people losing insurance for a moment, to reprimand me for being so cavalier about people’s lives.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, November 7, 2014
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