Michael Lind: Fixing the Supreme Court
Michael Lind’s new book, "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States", will be published in April and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com
On Monday, we had another example of the Supreme Court’s ideological division: a 5-4 ruling, along partisan lines, giving police the right to conduct strip searches for any offense. This came on the heels of last week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court about the constitutionality of the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act, which led many observers to predict that the nation’s highest judicial body will strike down part or all of the controversial healthcare reform package. But the hearings were instructive in other ways. They showed once again that political partisanship is closely correlated to a justice’s view of the law. And they proved that the Supreme Court once again is functioning, not as a court, but as a third house of the federal legislature.
The U.S. Constitution, like many state constitutions, really is two constitutions in one. There is the black-letter constitution, which consists of rules about which there is little or no dispute. Most of these have to do with qualifications for representatives, like Article I, Section 3, Clause 1, as amended: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.” Not a whole lot of room for interpretation there.
The other constitution, embedded in the same document, is the Blank Constitution. It is not so much a limit on power as an assignment of the power to fill in blanks left in the text, like the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” The need to fill in the blank is admitted even by champions of the “original intent theory,” who must dig up historical evidence of what the drafters and ratifiers might have thought was cruel and unusual punishment at the time of the Constitution’s adoption. The answer is not contained in the text....
The Whig Party between the 1830s and the 1860s thought that the federal judiciary should defer to Congress. The Whigs favored a strong, competent federal government and opposed restrictions on federal power in the name of the states. Opposed to the administration of Andrew Jackson, the Whig Party also wanted the powers of the presidency strictly limited. In the Whig view, the federal judiciary should defend congressional power against encroachments by the states and the executive branch, while deferring to the decisions of Congress on matters of federal legislation.
The Whig theory of the Constitution strikes me as a pretty good one. But it rules out judicial activism, which has been embraced at different times by different factions in American politics. Between the Civil War and the New Deal, a pro-business federal judiciary persecuted unions and struck down federal, state and local restraints on corporations. In the civil rights era, liberal federal judges went beyond striking down racist laws to discovering a “right to privacy” in the Constitution that has been used to eliminate or restrict laws against abortion and homosexuality. Whatever you think about the outcomes of these cases, it is clear that the courts in all of them were just making things up....