Balkinization  

Monday, July 25, 2005

A "Sick" Political-Legal System

Brian Tamanaha

Let's take a momentary break from John Roberts tea leaf reading prognosticating (never have I read so much, but learned so little about a person), and instead contemplate the broader situation.

How could we have developed a political-legal system in which a single man has so much apparent power to determine the fundamental principles and legal rules that will govern our individual, social, political, and economic lives?

What political or legal theory could justify or legitimate vesting so much power in a single judge in our liberal democracy of 300 million people?

Why are we collectively (liberals and conservatives, including President Bush) in the helpless position of hoping that the views of this one person won't be too contrary or harmful to our understandings of the law?

Skip the reasons for judicial review and explanations about the contemporary 5-4 alignment, and never mind saying that judges don't decide everything--yes, yes, yes--we know all that. Those points, correct as they may be, distract us from seeing the situation as it is: a single judge, a single man, will have immense power over us all (as did the woman he will be replacing).

Although is impossible to tell whether our political-legal system is suffering from a really bad case of the flu that we cannot seem to shake, or from terminal cancer, it seems clear that the system is sick. If you think this is an exaggeration, recall that five years ago five judges picked the President. I have made an attempt to diagnose some of the factors that have led to this condition, but it is beyond my ken. What I do know is that our political-legal system is in a terrible state.

Now, back to reading those Roberts tea leaves...

Comments:

rtsp://video.c-span.org/archive/sc/sc042105_justices.rm

Justice Scalia answers that question at 00:56:18 - 00:58:30. (See also Scalia's speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center).

I think - and most originalists think - that this is the inevitable consequence of politicising the court system. When the courts get into the business of passing on the wisdom of social policy, when the courts start inventing rights which do not exist (Griswold et al) in the Constitution, when the courts start placing back into the political arena rights which are constitutionally protected (Kelo), or worse yet, deleting those rights entirely (Craig), when Justices take it upon themselves to arrogate the Senate's authority to ratify or reject a treaty (Justice Ginsberg in the Michigan cases), when the Justices attempt to import foreign law into American law, when the courts start making political judgements, what do you think is going to happen? "No taxation without representation" was the birth cry of this nation, and so a system was created whereby there wold be not only no taxation laid, but no laws made without representation; the Constitution would be passed by the people, and all subsequent laws and amendments would be passed by the people's representatives. That's the nature of the system. So if the unelected branch starts to invade the sphere of the democratic branches, it should be obvious that the people - and the other branches - will attempt to assert their supremacy over the court. And this is an absolutely terrible idea, because it will ultimately destroy the idea of the court as a non-political branch, and it will destroy the distinction between law and politics. I promise you that if the Supreme Court becomes packed with nine Janice Rogers Browns, every liberal will be a strict constructionist - but by then, it will be too late, because the genie will be out of the bottle.

If the Justices can rule based on their own views, rather than on the original meaning of the Constituion, then whom is on the Court takes on a vastly inflated level of importance. Of course, it always matters who is on the court, because interpretation is not construction, and I doubt that Scalia and Breyer would necessarily rule the same way on every case, even if Breyer underwent a conversion on the road to Damascus, just as Scalia and Thomas don't always come out the same way. But that tendency becomes exacerbated when things that should be taken for granted are being questioned. If the court is not restrained by the text, then this is the patently obvious result.
 

Well, but Tom, I think the point of the original post is that John Roberts will have power much longer, and with much less direct popular input, than George Bush will.

Contrary to Simon's parade of judicial usurpations and mistakes, I think it pretty much all comes down to Roe v. Wade. If the S.C. got out of the abortion rights business, the political stakes would be lowered 90%. (I mean, are there really large numbers of people at faculty parties who feel that they have a personal stake in medical marijuana?) I think that the Court clearly misjudged the political future 30 years ago, and expected Roe to gain acceptance in the same way that Brown and Griswold had. But they were wrong.
 

Marbury v. Madison is the answer to your question. Do you wish for a new Andrew Jackson (I believe it was during the Seminole wars) to say, "John Marshall made his ruling. Now let him enforce it"?
 

The 17th amendment. If no man should be the judge in his own case, it's equally true that no level of government should have the capacity to chose the judges in it's own cases. Prior to the 17th, the states had significant influence over the composition of the federal judiciary, limiting the capacity of the federal government to politicize the federal judiciary in it's own favor.

Now, with the composition of the judiciary entirely in the control of people the limits of whose power the judiciary regularly rules on, the judiciary is becoming progressively more political. NOT because it is impossible for a judiciary to be non-political, but because it is not in the perceived self interest of those selecting that judiciary that it be non-political.

The claim that it could not be otherwise is just an effort to defend as inevitable something everyone outside the political class understands to be an evil which ought to be abolished if at all possible.
 

Seconding Simon...

Once you release a constitutional court from the bonds of the texts with notions of a "growing" "living" and "breathing" Constitution, you give the judges a license to legislate from the bench. Once they cease to be largely subservient to the law, and become masters of it, then the mastery of the court becomes the key political struggle. While common law judges did just make things up as they went along, the written Constitution was meant as an antidote to that kind of arbitariness.

In other words, if you expect the rest of us to take "emanations of penumbras" as legal principles set in stone, then you should expect in return that we will glibly appoint conservatives to set off in search of our own penumbral emanations, thus reducing the Court to a purely political creature, rather than a legal beast that occasionally strays into politics.
 

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