Overruled
Authors: Damon Root
O
v
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The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court
Damon Root
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Dedicated to my mother and to the memory of my father.
Introduction
The Long War
Can the federal government make you eat your fruits and vegetables? Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan seemed to think so. It was June 29, 2010, the second day of Kagan's confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma wanted to know whether she thought Congress possessed the constitutional power to force every American to “eat three vegetables and three fruits every day.” In response, the future Supreme Court justice laughed and said that while it “sounds like a dumb law,”
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that did not make it an unconstitutional one. “The [principal] protector against bad laws is the political branches themselves,” Kagan said. In other words, if you don't like what your lawmakers have done, take your complaint to the ballot box, not to the courthouse.
It was the classic case for judicial restraint, the idea that judges should defer to the will of the majority and refrain from striking down most democratically enacted laws, even the really dumb ones. As a model for this approach, Kagan cited the example of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “He was this judge who lived . . . in the early twentieth century,” Kagan explained. He “hated a lot of the
legislation that was being enacted . . . but insisted that if the people wanted it, it was their right to go hang themselves.”
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Appointed in 1902 by President Theodore Roosevelt, Justice Holmes was one of the Supreme Court's earliest and most influential advocates of judicial restraint or, as he once described it, “the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law.”
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By the time he retired in 1933, Holmes had preached the virtues of judicial deference in dozens of major cases, many of which continue to be cited today. Summarizing his philosophy as a judge in a 1920 letter to the British economist Harold Laski, Holmes declared, “if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job.”
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That view may sound harsh, but it didn't prevent Holmes from being adopted as a hero by the American left, particularly among the assorted reformers, activists, and politicians laboring under the banner of Progressivism, the turn-of-the-century movement that sought to create a vast new regulatory state to combat the perceived evils of industrial capitalism. Holmes was “a sage with the bearing of a cavalier,”
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gushed the Progressive journalist Walter Lippmann. New York judge Benjamin Cardozo, who would eventually replace Holmes on the Supreme Court, dubbed him “the philosopher and the seer.”
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His “little side-remarks and comments, falling from his lips casually,” contain “stuff sufficient for a treatise or a library.”
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Felix Frankfurter, a protégé of Holmes's and an eventual Supreme Court justice himself, managed to outdo even Cardozo in the praise department. Holmes “is led by the divination of the philosopher and the imagination of the poet,” Frankfurter exclaimed. “He is, indeed, philosopher become king.”
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As the Progressives saw it, if more judges would only follow the example set by Holmes, the reform movement would be free to make the government as big and powerful as it needed to be.
So Elena Kagan wasn't just showing off her knowledge of arcane legal history by invoking Holmes before the Senate Judiciary
Committee that day; she had placed herself squarely within a long and venerable legal tradition that seeks to give the government wide control over regulatory affairs while simultaneously preventing most interference from the courts. And as it turned out, Kagan would not be the only Holmesian on the bench.
Almost exactly two years later, on June 28, 2012, Holmes returned to the political stage once more, this time as one of the deciding factors in the biggest legal battle of the modern era, the clash over the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's sweeping health care overhaul, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
After a year's worth of skirmishing in the lower courts, the Supreme Court was finally set to announce its eagerly anticipated decision on the health care law that morning. Although the case against health care reform was initially dismissed by the president and his allies as a partisan stunt, the legal challenge had slowly gathered steam, winning first at the federal district court level and then, more significantly, at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, where a federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton joined the majority in voting against the Obama administration. “We have not found any generally applicable, judicially enforceable limiting principle that would permit us to uphold the [health care law] without obliterating the boundaries inherent in the system of enumerated congressional powers,”
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the Eleventh Circuit's ruling declared. To top it all off, not only had the Supreme Court recognized the seriousness of the challenge by setting aside three days to hear oral arguments in the caseâa modern recordâthose three days had not appeared to go very well for the federal government.
Indeed, not only had conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito seemed hostile to the Obama administration's case, which rested principally on the theory that Congress could require every American to buy health insurance as part of its power to regulate
interstate commerce, but even the right-leaning moderate Anthony Kennedy, who sometimes votes with the liberals and frequently casts the deciding vote in close cases, appeared to be lining up against the health care law. “When you are changing the relation of the individual to the government in this, what we can stipulate is, I think, a unique way,” Kennedy asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli as a packed courtroom looked on, “do you not have a heavy burden of justification to show authorization under the Constitution?”
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The stage appeared to be set for a landmark conservative victory. But then something else happened. In a decision that shocked many observers and infuriated most of the right, Chief Justice John Roberts, a veteran of Ronald Reagan's Justice Department and an appointee of George W. Bush, broke with his usual allies and sided instead with the Court's liberals. Thanks to Roberts, the health care law was upheld by the narrowest of margins: five votes to four.
Why did Roberts do it? He said it was an act of judicial restraint. Starting with the premise that legal statutes are owed a “full measure of deference”
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by the courts, Roberts proceeded to grant every measure of that deference in his opinion, interpreting the law in such a way that it could pass constitutional muster and avoid bringing down a judicial censor. As an authority for this deferential maneuvering, Roberts turned to none other than Justice Holmes, citing the famous jurist's concurring opinion in the 1927 case of
Blodgett v. Holden,
which declared, “between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the Act.”
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In other words, Roberts tipped the scale in favor of the government. “It is not our job,” declared the chief justice of the United States, taking yet another page from Holmes's playbook, “to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”
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Let them go to hell.
To say conservatives were outraged at Roberts would be putting it mildly. The
American Conservative
ran an article on the ruling titled “John Roberts's Betrayal,”
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while Republican Congressman Jack Kingston of Georgia declared on Twitter, “I feel like I just lost two great friends: America and Justice Roberts.”
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But Roberts had not actually betrayed legal conservatism; he had simply followed one of two possible conservative paths in the case. Judicial restraint, as Roberts well understood, was not only a touchstone of the Progressive left; it was also a philosophy adopted by many members of the modern right. Conservative icon Robert Bork, for example, the former Yale law professor and federal judge whose failed 1987 Supreme Court nomination had galvanized Republicans and set the stage for future judicial confirmation battles, was an outspoken proponent of granting Holmes-style deference to the elected branches of government. As Bork argued in his bestselling book
The Tempting of America,
the “first principle” of the U.S. system was not individual rights; it was majority rule, which meant that when it came to the vast preponderance of political disputes, the courts should simply butt out. “In wide areas of life,” Bork wrote, “majorities are entitled to rule, if they wish, simply because they are majorities.”
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Bork and other conservatives employed this approach most famously when it came to the issue of abortion. In their view, the Court's 1973 ruling in
Roe v. Wade,
which recognized a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, the Supreme Court had effectively overturned the abortion laws of all fifty states, substituting its judgment for the will of the people in every one of those places. Under the majoritarian deference espoused by Bork (and Holmes before him), each state would be free to set its own abortion policyâincluding a total prohibition on the procedureâwithout interference from the federal courts. Judicial restraint would therefore accomplish one of the central goals of modern conservatism: the death of
Roe v. Wade.
That was the path taken by Roberts in the health care case. The only problem was that very few conservatives wanted to join him for the ride. Instead of seeking judicial deference, they wanted the justices to nullify President Obama's signature legislative achievement and overrule the elected branches of governmentâsomething the Supreme Court had not done since the great legal battles over Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s.
This was the other conservative path, the one Roberts refused to take. Like the Bork-Holmes approach, it too has its roots in the legal and political controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Except this school of thought was not inspired by Holmes, but by the legal figures who opposed him: the conservative and libertarian judges and lawyers who rejected judicial deference and worked instead to strike down many of the laws imposed during the Progressive and New Deal eras.
Foremost among these figures was a man named Stephen Field. A pro-Union Democrat and former California Supreme Court justice, Field was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln. During his three decades on the bench, Justice Field would emerge as one of the Supreme Court's first great champions of property rights and economic liberty.
Born in Haddam, Connecticut, in 1816, Field moved west to California in the storied year of 1849. Shortly after disembarking from a steamship at San Francisco Bay, he helped to found the nearby gold rush town of Marysville, where his subsequent experiences now sound like something out of a Wild West adventure. As a practicing attorney, Field made powerful enemies: A notorious local judge named William Turner threatened to shoot him dead in the street after several contentious courtroom exchanges. In response, Field purchased “a pair of revolvers and had a sack-coat made with pockets in which the barrels could lie, and be discharged,” as he later recounted in his memoir. “I
began to practice firing the pistols from the pockets,” Field continued. “In time I acquired considerable skill, and was able to hit a small object across the street.”
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Judge Turner backed down.
Field brought a similar tenacity to his judicial career. On the Supreme Court, he became the driving force behind a legal theory that would come to be known as “liberty of contract.” Rooted in the free labor philosophy and self-ownership principles of the antislavery movement, liberty of contract held that the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee that no person be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law served to protect every individual's “right to pursue a lawful and necessary calling”
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against arbitrary and unnecessary government interference.
Over the next three decades, Field would expound on this and similar legal concepts in a series of powerful dissenting opinions. By the time he retired in 1897, a majority of the Supreme Court was coming around to his libertarian point of view. That year, a unanimous Court explicitly recognized the right to pursue a calling, enshrining a broad guarantee of economic liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment. During the three decades that followed, the Supreme Court would selectively employ that guarantee against various government regulations until the doctrine was reversed during the height of the New Deal.
Revived over the past four decades by a growing camp of libertarians and free-market conservatives, the aggressive legal approach once associated with Justice Field and his successors has come roaring back to life in the early twenty-first century. Its modern followers have no patience with judicial restraint and little use for majority rule. They want the courts to police the other branches of government, striking down any state or federal law that infringes on their broad constitutional vision of personal and economic freedom, an approach one libertarian theorist has dubbed “principled judicial activism.”
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They are
the sworn enemies of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. We'll call them the libertarian legal movement.
The long war between judicial restraint and judicial action is the central theme of this book. As we'll see, it's a contest that cuts across the political spectrum in surprising ways and makes for some unusual bedfellows. Once the exclusive domain of the Progressive left, for example, judicial deference is now a favored tool of the conservative right. Chief Justice Roberts made that point abundantly clear in his striking 2012 decision to uphold President Obama's health care law. And that's not the only twist in this long, strange trip. The DNA of Justice Field, the late nineteenth-century conservative who said the courts should place certain freedoms beyond the reach of lawmakers, lives on prominently today in the landmark liberal rulings that legalized birth control and eliminated state restrictions on “homosexual conduct.”