They Were Against Judicial Activism Before They Were For It

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

A federal appeals judge has ordered the Department of Justice to clarify whether the President thinks the courts have a right to strike down a federal law, and to do so in writing by Thursday. Apparently our President was being uppity again in offering the opinion that finding the ACA unconstitutional would be unprecedented. And it would be, in the sense that to do so the justices would have to reverse some of their own precedents on points of law. But the mouth-breathers on the Right have decided the President doesn’t know that justices may find laws unconstitutional and are now defending Marbury v. Madision as the cornerstone of liberty.

By itself we might dismiss this as the Usual Clown Show. But Paul Campos writes at Lawyers, Guns & Money

A very distinguished professor of constitutional law — a man widely viewed as a conservative at least in legal academic circles — was asked recently to write an essay for a prominent conservative opinion magazine on some current legal controversies, including Citizens United decision and the ongoing litigation over same-sex marriage rights. He used the essay as an occasion to reiterate certain fundamental criticisms of the culture of judicial review, and in particular the mental habits that culture inculcates in judges.

The essay had gone through the editorial process and was in press when the Editor in Chief of the publication decided not to run the piece. Needless to say the author was both surprised and annoyed by this reversal, and had several conversations with the EIC about it. In sum, the EIC explained that it was now the policy — or what I believe in another time and place would have been referred to as “the line” — of the publication that it should not be encouraging basic criticisms of judicial review as a legal practice and cultural phenomenon “at this time.” In the course of these conversations it became very clear to the author that “at this time” meant “when this practice has once again become on the whole beneficial to the political goals of American conservatives.”

Now, add to this the influence of hard-right Super PACs. Thanks to Citizens United, the same puppet masters who gave us ALEC are using their money to elect right-wing judges at state level. Example

Like judges elsewhere, those in Florida remain rattled by what happened two years ago in Iowa, where three state Supreme Court justices who had upheld a ruling in favor of same-sex marriage lost their jobs after a vitriolic million-dollar campaign to unseat them — money coming almost entirely from outside the state. In the preceding decade, not a single dollar had reportedly been spent on Iowa’s high court elections.

So in order to keep their seats, judges up for re-election have to kiss right-wing ass. The Washington Post article linked in the paragraph above documents unprecedented amounts of out-of-state money being used to pick off state judges that conservatives don’t like.

And now the “line” is that maybe judicial activism isn’t such a bad thing after all. Stack enough courts with the “right” judges, and they can throw case law out the window and rule however they want.

James Fallows writes that people around the world are getting nervous about U.S. Courts. A reader from The Netherlands wrote,

And the reporting from the Supreme Court has been profoundly shocking – with conservative justices spouting tea party/talk radio talking points about broccoli and cell-phone mandates, and non-existent Cornhusker Kickbacks. Scalia’s ‘originalism’ is being demonstrated to be fundamentally hollow and partisan.

I am not an American and do not live in the US. But what is happening in the world’s most important and powerful democracy is shocking and frightening in the absolute, and does concern the rest of the world.

Fallows goes on to review recent cases, starting with Bush v. Gore, that showed the Court in bare-knuckles partisan mode. What the recent ACA hearing shows us is that at least some of the justices, Scalia especially, don’t even feel a need to pretend to be nonpartisan.

Certainly, past Courts have issued rulings with profound political implications; Dred Scott comes to mind. But for most of the 20th century the Court was a bulwark against the nation’s worst impulses. No more.

Update: See also Steve Benen writes about the federal judge’s demand from the DOJ:

This is not only ridiculous, it’s also an embarrassment to the federal judiciary at a time when the institution can least afford another setback in its credibility.

No matter what you think of president or this case, when powerful judges start acting like childish politicians, it’s cause for genuine concern about the integrity of our courts.

… and Kevin Drum:

Despite the fact that Kaersvang immediately acknowledged that courts can indeed strike down laws, the panel ordered her to “submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power.”

Seriously? These judges are acting like a middle school teacher handing out punishment to a student because of something her father said at a city council meeting the night before. I’m a little hard pressed to finish up this post on quite the right note of jaw-droppitude, but luckily an attorney friend from the South just emailed me about this. Here’s his take:

This is meant to embarrass the President. Full stop. Jesus, this is getting scary. It just seems like all out partisan war brought by the Republicans from all corners of the Government. They want to push it as far as they can. And then further. It’s incredibly destructive.

Eat It, Scalia

I haven’t had a chance to react to this week’s Supreme Court drama. So let me just link to some other reactions.

Dahlia Lithwick was reasonably upbeat after the first day of arguments. Not so by the end of it. “It’s not a good day for the Affordable Care Act,” she writes. “This morning’s argument requires the justices to start from the assumption that the court will strike down the individual mandate (the issue argued exhaustively yesterday) and asks them to pick over the carcass, to determine what, if anything, survives.”

The most illuminating comment is by Charles Pierce.

I think Justice Antonin Scalia isn’t even really trying any more….He hung in there as long as he could, but he’s now bringing Not Giving A Fuck to an almost operatic level….

…It is plain now that Scalia simply doesn’t like the Affordable Care Act on its face. It has nothing to do with “originalism,” or the Commerce Clause, or anything else. He doesn’t think that the people who would benefit from the law deserve to have a law that benefits them. On Tuesday, he pursued the absurd “broccoli” analogy to the point where he sounded like a micro-rated evening-drive talk-show host from a dust-clotted station in southern Oklahoma. And today, apparently, he ran through every twist and turn in the act’s baroque political history in an attempt to discredit the law politically, rather than as a challenge to its constitutionality.

See also John Cole, who has a long roundup of many other reactions. Worth reading.

Update: Krugman

Given the stakes, one might have expected all the court’s members to be very careful in speaking about both health care realities and legal precedents. In reality, however, the second day of hearings suggested that the justices most hostile to the law don’t understand, or choose not to understand, how insurance works. And the third day was, in a way, even worse, as antireform justices appeared to embrace any argument, no matter how flimsy, that they could use to kill reform.

We’re been calling the Roberts court “corporatist,” but the weird thing here is that the insurance industry wants the mandate. This reveals at least some of them to not be so much pro-corporation as pro-Republican Party.

Anyone else who doesn’t get why the broccoli defense is stupid needs to read Krugman’s entire column.

Update:Justice Scalia is an oxymoron.”

SCOTUS and Tea Leaves

The oral arguments over the Affordable Care Act are over, and I’ve been cruising around getting reactions. First, there’s general agreement that it be be a divided decision, and the swing votes will belong to Roberts and Kennedy. No surprise there, I don’t think.

Today the Court heard arguments about “severability,” or whether the entire law has to fall if the individual mandate is struck down. And it appears there may be some awareness on the court that if the mandate goes, and the ACA stays, somebody’s got to pick through the whole beast and revise the thing. The Court doesn’t want that job, but they appeared skeptical that Congress is up to it, either.

David Savage of the Los Angeles Times writes that the justices seem to be leaning toward striking down the whole law, but other writers are not that pessimistic, or optimistic as the case may be.

Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog writes,

The Supreme Court spent 91 minutes Wednesday operating on the assumption that it would strike down the key feature of the new health care law, but may have convinced itself in the end not to do that because of just how hard it would be to decide what to do after that. A common reaction, across the bench, was that the Justices themselves did not want the onerous task of going through the remainder of the entire 2,700 pages of the law and deciding what to keep and what to throw out, and most seemed to think that should be left to Congress. They could not come together, however, on just what task they would send across the street for the lawmakers to perform. The net effect may well have shored up support for the individual insurance mandate itself.

The dilemma could be captured perfectly in two separate comments by Justice Antonin Scalia — first, that it “just couldn’t be right” that all of the myriad provisions of the law unrelated to the mandate had to fall with it, but, later, that if the Court were to strike out the mandate, “then the statute’s gone.” Much of the lively argument focused on just what role the Court would more properly perform in trying to sort out the consequences of nullifying the requirement that virtually every American have health insurance by the year 2014.

There is widespread agreement that the decision could define the Roberts court. This has caused some people to speculate that Roberts may vote to uphold the act just so he can’t be accused of being a right-wing tool. But if he’s the right-wing tool many assume him to be, he won’t care what anyone thinks. You can’t beat being a Supreme Court Chief Justice for job security, after all.

I’m making no predictions. It could go either way.

James Carville argues that if the Supremes flush Obamacare, politically this could work out better for the Dems than for Republicans. Carville says,

“Just as a professional Democrat, there’s nothing better to me than overturning this thing 5-4 and then the Republican Party will own the health care system for the foreseeable future. And I really believe that. That is not spin,” Carville said.

David Frum agrees that a loss for Republicans in the Court would present a bigger political challenge to them than a win. And that’s because Republicans have nothing ready to replace the ACA. After all this time, they’re still hauling out the same loser arguments about tort reform and selling insurance across state lines.

My uninformed guess: the ACA prevails, and probably not by a narrow margin.

What then?

What then is that healthcare comes roaring back as a campaign issue, to which Republicans have failed to provide themselves an answer. Because of the prolonged economic downturn, more Americans than ever have lost—or are at risk of losing—their health coverage. Many of them will be voting in November. What do Republicans have to say to them?

Make no mistake: If Republicans lose in the Supreme Court, they’ll need an answer. “Repeal” may excite a Republican primary electorate that doesn’t need to worry about health insurance because it’s overwhelmingly over 65 and happily enjoying its government-mandated and taxpayer-subsidized single-payer Medicare system. But the general-election electorate doesn’t have the benefit of government medicine. It relies on the collapsing system of employer-directed care. It’s frightened, and it wants answers.

“Unconstitutional” was an answer of a kind. But if the ACA is not rejected as “unconstitutional,” the question will resurface: if you guys don’t want this, want do you want instead?

In that case, Republicans will need a Plan B. Unfortunately, they wasted the past three years that might have developed one. If the Supreme Court doesn’t rescue them from themselves, they’ll be heading into this election season arguing, in effect, Our plan is to take away the government-mandated insurance of millions of people under age 65, and replace it with nothing. And we’re doing this so as to better protect the government-mandated insurance of people over 65—until we begin to phase out that insurance, too, for everybody now under 55.

But if the ACA is struck down, won’t the Republicans still be under the gun to crank out an alternative? Well, maybe not until after the election.

See also The Rock Biter Theory Of Health Care Reform Legislation.

Update: See Steve Kornacki, “The Debate the GOP Can’t Have.”

GOP for Individual Mandate Before They Were Against It

Awesome segment by Rachel Maddow last nignt —

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Maddow documents that way back when Republicans were battling the evil “Hillarycare” instead of the evil “Obamacare,” Republicans pushed an individual mandate to purchase health insurance as a solution for soaring health care costs. And this includes some of the same Republicans who today declare that the individual mandate is the end of liberty as we know it. If you are short of time you can skip to the 5 minute mark, right before the juicy bits start.

Update:
Several news stories say that the justice’s questioning today suggests the conservatives on the Court are going to end the mandate. Steve Kornacki says ain’t necessarily so. Ezra Klein is less optimistic.

The Supremes Will Decide

This morning the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of one of the health care reform challenges. Adam Liptak writes for the New York Times:

The Supreme Court agreed to hear appeals from just one decision, from the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, the only one so far striking down the mandate. The decision, from a divided three-judge panel, said the mandate overstepped Congressional authority and could not be justified by the constitutional power “to regulate commerce” or “to lay and collect taxes.”

The appeals court went no further, though, severing the mandate from the rest of the law.

On Monday, the justices agreed to decide not only whether the mandate is constitutional but also whether, if it is not, how much of the balance of the law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, must fall along with it.

SCOTUS will hear arguments in March and will probably hand down a decision in June, smack in the middle of the general election campaigns.

Ezra Klein has a backgrounder on the legal issues in the case.

Compromised Justice

Having just spent way too much time this afternoon explaining to one of our drive-by teabaggers why Judge Roger Vinson doesn’t know the Constitution from his own ass, I was delighted to see that some Dems already are calling for Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself if the constitutionality of health care reform is decided by the SCOTUS.

Why? Because the Justice’s wife is a lobbyist working against the health care reform act. Duh.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) and 72 other colleagues wrote Thomas on Wednesday to ask him to sit out any Supreme Court review of President Obama’s healthcare law, citing the work by Thomas’s wife on behalf of efforts opposing that healthcare law.

“As members of Congress, we were surprised by recent revelations of your financial ties to leading organizations dedicated to lobbying against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” the Democrats wrote. “We write today to respectfully ask that you maintain the integrity of this court and recuse yourself from any deliberations on the constitutionality of this act.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch has called for Justice Elena Kagan to recuse herself from health care reform cases because she worked in the Obama administration as solicitor general. It seems to me that Justice Thomas is way more compromised on this issue, though, because he currently enjoys financial gain from his wife’s political activities. He might as well be taking direct bribes from the groups fighting the reform law.

And based on some of his past decisions, Justice Thomas’s vote will most likely be against constitutionality.

Kagan Confirmed

Elena Kagan is confirmed by the Senate and will be sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Court. That’s three women on the court, folks. I can remember when the nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor had some troglodytes wetting their pants. Hell, I can remember when local television stations began to hire women to give the weather reports (“weather girls”), and the troglodytes wet their pants over that.

It strikes me also that the Right’s usual smear campaign wasn’t nearly as visible as it was for Sonia Sotomayor. I guess a Jewish woman is not as scary as a Latina woman.

The Irony of McDonald v. Chicago

I defer to Scott Lemieux’s legal analysis of McDonald v. Chicago, the gun rights decision handed down by SCOTUS today. I’m not going to quote it here; just read the whole thing, and then come back.

From a liberal perspective, any act of SCOTUS that dismantles the 19th century Slaughterhouse decision and rules that the 14th Amendment applies to the states ain’t a bad thing. This is the same legal principle on which most of the great civil rights decisions of the 20th century were based. I believe most if not all of the decisions that have ever caused wingnuts to scream about the awfulness of liberal judicial activism were tied somehow to the 14th Amendment forcing states to observe the rights of U.S. citizens.

Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated public schools, rested on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Scott says the majority opinion in McDonald cites the due process clause of the 14th, which also is a critical part of Roe v. Wade and all of the cases that decided public schools should not be leading prayers in classrooms, such as Abington School District v. Schempp.

In other words, exactly the same part of the Constitution that allowed legal abortion and threw classroom prayers out of public schools has now been cited in a way that probably will overturn a whole lot of state and local gun control ordinances, and righties are dancing in the streets.

Given the Heller decision (see also this), I think McDonald is no big surprise. But while I appreciate the legal foundation of the decision the result — which will be to dismantle a lot of gun control ordinances, mostly in urban areas — worries me. And, frankly, I think it ought to worry the NRA as well.

Contrary to wingnut lore, there is not a huge public sentiment in favor of dismantling gun control laws. According to polls, recent and going back a few years, the enormous majority of the public either thinks gun control laws should be left as they are now (42 percent, according to an April CBS/New York Times poll), or made more strict (40 percent, same poll). So, per this poll, 82 percent of the public thinks gun control laws should be left as they are or made stricter, compared to 16 percent who want gun laws to be less strict. An October Gallup poll had nearly the same result.

It’s true that when the poll questions are framed in terms of gun rights rather than gun control, the numbers are somewhat more favorable to the NRA position. But I think this is the result of people reacting to the word “rights” — we’re always in favor of “rights” — without thinking through logical consequences. In other words, there are people who favor gun rights in the abstract, but they also want gun control in their neighborhoods.

And it is possible that if the NRA gets too aggressive about dismantling gun control laws, especially in large urban areas, the day may come when people start to think long and hard about amending the Second Amendment. That may be many years down the road, and I may not live to see it, but I think it could happen.

Update: Steve M on why the gun control war will never be over. And it isn’t because the gun control movement won’t quit. The gun control movement pretty much faded out of view several years ago, except in the fevered hallucinations of the NRA.

And that’s not just because they won’t consider America to be anything less than a fascist dictatorship until it’s as easy for virtually anyone to buy a gun in D.C., Chicago, or New York City as it is in, say, rural Mississippi. Even if the day comes when we have gun laws everywhere that are as loose as the loosest ones now (and I think that’s far more likely over the next couple of decades than ever passing any laws anywhere that actually tighten gun access), the gunners still won’t admit they’ve won.

They can’t. As I say here all the time, the belief that right-wingers are the perpetual victims of liberal fascism is a core element of their self-image. What’s more, believing this is what opens up wingers’ wallets and keeps groups like the NRA and Gun Owners of America — as well as every other right-wing organization that seeks small contributions — well funded and healthy.

In politics there is no hand so good it can’t be overplayed, I say.

The Constitutional Anchor Baby Crisis

A few days ago Rand Paul expounded on the “anchor baby” crisis. Anchor babies are, of course, babies born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. The babies are citizens by virtue of their birth, and this infuriates righties. In recent years Republican lawmakers have been promoting a bill that would deny citizenship to such babies. Mind you, this is coming from some of the same people who want to extend citizenship to frozen embryos.

Yesterday, in an entirely different context, Jeffrey Goldberg quoted the Babylonian Talmud: “Who is wise? The one who can foresee consequences.” That may become my new favorite saying. Applied to the citizenship question — like it or not, the 14th Amendment gave us a clear, bright line regarding citizenship:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I can see all kinds of unfortunate consequences of making that clear, bright line fuzzier and darker. Leave well enough alone, I say.

Now, most legal experts say that because of the 14th Amendment, Congress does not have the power to deny citizenship to so-called “anchor babies.” Doing this would require a constitutional amendment. But righties are arguing no, because the 14th Amendment doesn’t say what it says. This argument was presented by none other than George Will a few days ago, and it is a tortured argument, indeed. But when I read Will’s column I didn’t have the time to research what he was saying to see if it could hold mayonnaise, never mind water.

But lo, yesterday, while researching something else entirely, I ran into a discussion of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898) (see also Wikipedia discussion of Wong). Wong Kim Ark was a man born in the United States of ethnic Chinese parents. At the time, the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect. You probably remember that this barred anyone of the Chinese “race” from entering the U.S., and it denied citizenship to ethnic Chinese people already in the U.S. Wong challenged this law, and in a 6-2 decision the Supreme Court agreed with Wong, and said he was a citizen of the United States by virtue of being born here. And it seems to me there’s a made-for-television movie script in there somewhere.

Anyway, as I read about the Wong decision I realized that the dissenting argument in the Wong case is exactly the same argument being made today by Will and the Republican lawmakers.

The dissent was based on an interpretation of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Will and the two SCOTUS dissenters (John Harlan and Melville Fuller) say this phrase means “and not subject to any foreign power.” In their dissent of Wong, Harlan and Fuller point out that native Americans were (at the time) not citizens of the U.S. because the Civil Rights Act of 1866 had given citizenship to “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed.”

This act became law just two months before the 14th Amendment was proposed. So, the argument is, this wording gives us insight into where lawmakers’ heads were at the time. And thus, if the parents are subjects of a foreign power, then their baby born in the U.S. is not eligible for citizenship. This was the dissenting opinion in Wong in 1898, and Will repeated this same argument in his Washington Post column. Will doesn’t bother discussing that pesky Wong majority opinion, however.

Will argues further,

What was this [the jurisdiction phrase] intended or understood to mean by those who wrote it in 1866 and ratified it in 1868? The authors and ratifiers could not have intended birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants because in 1868 there were and never had been any illegal immigrants because no law ever had restricted immigration.

As far as I know, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first attempt to render any sort of immigration illegal, and it didn’t become law until 1882. Congress had passed an earlier version of the exclusion act in 1878, but this was vetoed by President Hayes. But the Wong majority decision says plainly that an act of Congress making Chinese immigration illegal, and denying citizenship status to ethnic Chinese, did not override the clear language of the 14th Amendment.

So, whether Will and the Republican lawmakers like it or not, SCOTUS already nixed their argument.

The majority opinion in Wong is based partly on English common law, which said that babies born in England are English, with the exception of the children of diplomats and children born to hostile forces occupying English territory.

In addition, at the time native American tribes were not considered subject to U.S. jurisdiction and were therefore not citizens. Another case decided in 1884 (Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94) had declared that a native American who left his tribe and went to live in a white community didn’t automatically get citizenship, although he could be considered a citizen if he went through whatever naturalization process existed at the time and paid taxes.

Will leans heavily on the example of non-citizen native Americans to argue that the 14th Amendment was not intended to confer citizenship to babies of foreigners who happened to be in the U.S. at the time. But the Elk decision (which Will doesn’t mention, either) did not consider Indian tribes to be foreign states. A tribe was an alien political entity which Congress dealt with through treaties, but not the same thing as a foreign nation.

So, it seems to me the Wong decision — the majority opinion, anyway — more closely speaks to the circumstance of babies born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants than does the Elk decision. And I think I just blew by nerd blogging quotient for the day.

Update: Read more about Wong Kim Ark in “The Progeny of Citizen Wong.”