Winks and Blinks: How Constitutional Republics Expire

What provoked this post?

Living in a dying Republic.

Not a murdered one, stabbed through its Senate by a rising Empire, as in Rome. Not one ravaged by the depredations of wars, external or internal. Just one that stopped caring passionately about its continuation. One that simply concluded that frames, forms, boundaries and limits on governmental reach were meaningless, often unhelpful to personal interests, and able to be ignored without cost.

How bizarrely we think!

We look long back at Jefferson, Madison, Washington, and see their slaves. We look long back at Franklin, Adams, Gerry, and see their toleration of slavery.

We entirely miss their genius exhibited by framing a system in which those who held slaves, even ones who saw their own acts as immoral, and those who found slavery reprehensible, could toil together toward their common LIBERATION FROM TYRANNY.

Now we only see the undeniable injustice of the slavery. Now we only see the true complicity of the agreement.

We do not see the risk they took. We do not see the sacrifices they made. We do not see the labor of their lifetimes.

We simply deny the existence of giants on whose shoulders this Nation has stood. Worse, we have undertaken an assault and battery on them, hammering and chiseling away at the very shoulders on which we stand.

What we deny seeing is that these injustices and that complicity were, not are. They are in the past. While wrongs assuredly echo into the generations, our Nation has paid, is paying, the piper for the tune those gentlemen danced.

But, we should also see this:

Every descendant of slaves born today in this Nation lives, by comparison with his cousins, both those distant in time and those distant in geography, in a most kingly fashion. Yes, even when such descendants live in government housing, eating government cheese, attending government schools, getting health care through a government plan, they are living like kings compared to children that walk an hour each way to collect filthy water, that would relish the moments on the bus, in the classroom, and in the Section 8 housing provided to them.

That is not to say that we should be contented that we have achieved a national level of affluence sufficient to afford charitable care for millions. Instead, we should be in the business of getting out of the way of liberty, out of the way of private economic arrangements that grow opportunity for all.

But, this posting is not so much about that, as it is about the sometimes terrible fear I have that those to whom we entrust the instruments of government, and we who repose those trust, alike, no longer see harm in liberties lost, in mounding up the powers of government.

Winks and blinks, I fear, will be the death of our Republic.

Winks, of course, signify an agreement.

You've seen this time and again, perhaps beginning with your parents' shared winks when one of them confirmed that the tooth fairy left you the quarter under your pillow, or that Santa had eaten the cookies you left for him.

In the enterprise of liberty, one of the important, but not original, features of the frameworks of both our State and federal governments is the division of power between branches. We have Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches. Each has powers and responsibilities, and these are different in character and relevant to their sphere of responsibility.

We know that the Legislature -- in your State and in Washington, DC -- make laws, the Governor and the President enforce laws, and the Judiciary judges the enforcement of criminal laws and hear civil cases between parties. That is the design as crafted in State Constitutions and in the federal one.

Yet, the winks never end.

For example, Congress enacts laws to regulate the safety of foods. Yet, because an exhaustive statute law to cover the topic would consume many thousands of pages, Congress creates an agency, the Food and Drug Administration. It grants discretionary power to the agency, by rules and regulations to fill out the blanks if the Food law. It winks, if you will, at an Executive agency engaged in making law.

Here's a good example of the results of ignoring that boundary line.

The photo to the left shows a printed copy of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). It passed Congress at a substantial girth of just over 2000 pages. It seems like a substantial law, doesn't it? And given its length, who can blame Nancy Pelosi for not reading the law, and who can blame Barack Obama for making promises without reading the law.

Yet.

As huge as that law is, it is an infant, a mere bagatelle, by comparison with the body of regulations that have been generated by the several agencies involved with implementing the Obamacare law. Agencies including the

Department of Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service of the Treasury Department, the Food and Drug Administration, and others all have RULE-MAKING ROLES under Obamacare.

When the rules and regulations adopted to implement Obamacare are stacked together, the stunning multiplication threatens the record when Jesus fed the five thousand with just a few loaves and fishes. The picture on the right shows the regulations enacted by the agencies.

But, wait, there is more.

An agency like the FDA, it is charged with enforcing the law. Typically, law enforcement consists of a government actor examining private conduct to determine whether that conduct comports with requirements of law. If the conduct does not comport with law, the law enforcement agent or agency brings the individual or organization into a court, either by suing them, or by filing a criminal charge. The application of the law to the facts -- determining if the government actor correctly concluded that the conduct was unlawful -- is done by the judiciary. Yet, with winks from both the judiciary and the legislature, federal agencies (and many State ones) conduct quasi-judicial proceedings.

The incessant winking of the branches has produced, particularly at the federal level, but also in many States, a bricolage of powers and responsibilities shared among branches, rather than particular, even peculiar, to each. That circumstance leave a beleaguered populace confused, disoriented and uncertain whether the collapse of their liberties results from real wrongs, trespassory actions of judges acting like legislatures, executive agencies acting like judges and legislatures, and legislatures not wanting to bear full faith and allegiance to the Constitution by performing their jobs and stopping overreaches by the remaining branches.

And that brings us to the blinking.

Blinking, on the other hand, signals surrender. 

That notion is captured in an Ad Age article about the cola wars.

In the constitutional framework, there are balancing mechanisms that are essential to keep the powers of the federal government divided. In The Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton explains it this way:

The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.

So, the President "holds the sword." Do not confuse that as a reference to the President's role as Commander in Chief. It is a direct reference to the Letter of Paul to the Romans, where Paul remarked that "magistrate beareth not the sword in vain." The sword that the President bears is the sword of enforcement, of punishment.

And the Congress both makes the laws by which we live, but prescribes the structure of taxes and expenditures by the government. Elsewhere the authors of the Federalists explain (and the secret notes of the Constitutional Convention reflect this thinking) that the power to tax and the power to make laws were placed in the local electorate because it maintains that intimacy of connection between those that legislate and those upon whom the burden of legislation is laid.

The Judiciary lacks the force of the Executive, with its powers of arrest and prosecution, and it lacks the will of the Legislative, with its power to make laws, assess taxes, and order expenditures. The Judiciary has only judgment.

Take all three of these powers. Consolidate them in a man. You will call that man, Majesty, Highness, Chairman, Fuhrer. What you call him, no matter what it is, will mean, in fact, tyrant. That conjoined triplet of tyranny is the fearful monster the Framers of the Constitution sought to avert every arising in this new Nation. That is the reason for the Separation of Powers.

But, there is more than separated functions for these separated branches to the security of our liberty.

Particularly in the Congress, there is an insurmountable power that makes the Legislature more powerful than either of the remaining branches: the power to impeach and remove constitutional officers, including Presidents, cabinet officials, Supreme Court justices and federal judges.

Hold on, Jim, did you just say that the Congress is MORE POWERFUL than either the President or the Judiciary?

Yes, in fact, I did.

Because of the power to impeach and remove officers of the government, Congress holds the winning card in EVERY HAND. The Constitution simply does not admit of an equally effective weapon for the use of either the President or the Courts. True, we read about individual Congressmen being arrested on corruption charges. Also true, we read about judges from time to time that issue injunctions against government programs (Judge Andrew Hanen in Texas, who enjoined the DAPA deferral program of the Obama administration comes to mind). But, in the main, these powers of the Executive and the Judiciary do not arch over, or overmatch, the Congress.

So, in a system in which the power of the Congress PREDOMINATES over the Presidency and the Judiciary, how do we come to the point where now we are?

By the blinking surrender.

Here's an example. In 2013, the Congress and President Obama could not come to agreement on funding legislation for the federal government. Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, Democrats controlled the Senate. House Republicans came to power in 2010, in a nationwide revulsion to various aspects of Obamacare, including its provisions and the process that led to its enactment.

Throughout 2013, TEA Party activists, fiscal conservative Republicans, and others had engaged the public in an effort to build support for a Congressional solution to the problematic and controversial legislation. Ultimately, House Republicans prepared spending measures that left Obamacare functions unfunded; Senate Democrats had their own proposal that funded the law's enforcement and implementation. Unable to reach agreement, the end of September, 2013, spending authorization for discretionary government functions expired.

On the Republican side, however, commitment to a shut down of the government -- previously accepted as a reasonable action to prevail on the issue of Obamacare -- wavered. Moderate Republican Senator Lamar Alexander worked out a funding solution with Senator Chuck Schumer. Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed to the legislation. That proposal did not defund Obamacare (the original proposal from the House). That proposal did not delay implementation of Obamacare for a year (a second proposal from the House). The Republicans, in a word, blinked.

The blinking goes beyond budget battles related to Obamacare. And it is not limited to Congressional blinking.

Recall President Obama's plan to conduct a bombing campaign against Assad in Syria, back in the late summer of 2013? Although that campaign appears to be a possible resurrection now, broad-based opposition, both domestic and internationally, resulted in Obama's threat being all teeth and no bite. Obama blinked.

Now, in the end of things, the blinking on discrete policy issues is just part of politics, the give and take of compromise in a heterogeneous population.

Blinking on the boundaries of constitutional power and duty, however, presents grave risk of harm. The balance of powers depends not only on each department of the government restraining itself to its granted powers, but on each department, to the extent it lies within its granted powers to do so, to check excesses in the others. Impeaching the justices of the Supreme Court would check an excess in which they began to usurp, for example, the presidential power to command the military forces of the United States. Prosecuting a Senator because her votes were corrupted by benefits offered to her by an interested party -- for taking a bribe -- would check that Senator.

But when none of the departments of the government asserts and employs its power to check excesses of the other branches, a disrespect for the entire framework becomes unavoidable.

President Obama says that he will conclude an international agreement with Iran regarding sanctions that have been in place for twenty-five years, sanctions targeting the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism. Moreover, Obama says he will do so without agreement thereto by the Senate. Now, Obama's position has been defended, by Secretary of State Kerry, for example, on the ground that the agreement to be reached is not a "treaty" as that term is used in the Constitution. The Constitution, of course, requires that treaties negotiated by the President depend the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate.

By recasting the arrangement with Iran and other international powers as an "agreement," Obama clearly intends to avoid submission to the Senate's advice and consent the questions of ending sanctions against Iran's regime and turning a blind eye to the long-sought Iranian goal of becoming a nuclear power. This abuse of the Constitution ought to provoke a constitutional response. I have previously described three constitutional checks on power granted to the Congress alone: oversight, budget, and impeachment.

In response to Obama's disregard of the Senate's constitutional role, will we see yet another blinking Congress? Will Congress fail to restrict the budget of the Executive Branch as a discipline for Obama's defiance? Will Congress fail to call the Secretary of State to account in hearings on all aspects of the "agreement?" Will Congress fail to show the resolve embodied in the decision to impeach the President, the Secretary of State, and other complicit officers of the United States?

We already know the answers to these questions are yes, yes, yes, and yes.

And that, my friends, is how a Republic dies.

Scalia to Kennedy: Your Opinion is Embarrassing

Perhaps the best direct insult written by one justice about the opinion for the Court by another Justice came today in the dissent of Scalia. My excerpted version of his dissent, included below, omits the footnotes; those are, virtually entirely, reference notes only. But this beaut is in there too, so I present it at the top:

If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.

I will write further on the case and its implications. For now, the dissent of Justice Scalia is a clarion cry of warning about the death of the Republic at the hands of our black-robed mystics:
______________________________________________________________________

Scalia, dissenting

The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me. The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes, and can accord them favorable civil consequences, from tax treatment to rights of inheritance.

Those civil consequences—and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage  evidences—can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage.
It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

I

Until the courts put a stop to it, public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best. Individuals on both sides of the issue passionately, but respectfully, attempted to persuade their fellow citizens to accept their views. Americans considered the arguments and put the question to a vote. The electorates of 11 States, either directly or through their representatives, chose to expand the traditional definition of marriage.

Many more decided not to.1 Win or lose, advocates for both sides continued pressing their cases, secure in the knowledge that an electoral loss can be negated by a later electoral win. That is exactly how our system of government is supposed to work.2

The Constitution places some constraints on self-rule—constraints adopted by the People themselves when they ratified the Constitution and its Amendments. Forbidden are laws “impairing the Obligation of Contracts,”3 denying “Full Faith and Credit” to the “public Acts” of other States,4 prohibiting the free exercise of religion,5 abridging the freedom of speech,6 infringing the right to keep and bear arms,7 authorizing unreasonable searches and seizures,8 and so forth. Aside from these limitations, those powers “reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”9 can be exercised as the States or the People desire.

These cases ask us to decide whether the Fourteenth Amendment contains a limitation that requires the States to license and recognize marriages between two people of the same sex. Does it remove that issue from the political process?

Of course not. It would be surprising to find a prescription regarding marriage in the Federal Constitution since, as the author of today’s opinion reminded us only two years ago (in an opinion joined by the same Justices who join him today):

“[R]egulation of domestic relations is an area that has long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of the States.”10

“[T]he Federal Government, through our history, has deferred to state-law policy decisions with respect to domestic relations.”11

But we need not speculate. When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, every State limited marriage to one man and one woman, and no one doubted the constitutionality of doing so. That resolves these cases. When it comes to determining the meaning of a vague constitutional provision—such as “due process of law” or “equal protection of the laws”—it is unquestionable that the People who ratified that provision did not understand it to prohibit a practice that remained both universal and uncontroversial in the years after ratification.12

We have no basis for striking down a practice that is not expressly prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment’s text, and that bears the endorsement of a long tradition of open, widespread, and unchallenged use dating back to the Amendment’s ratification. Since there is no doubt whatever that the People never decided to prohibit the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples, the public debate over same-sex marriage must be allowed to continue.

But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law. Buried beneath the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion is a candid and startling assertion: No matter what it was the People ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment protects those rights that the Judiciary, in its “reasoned judgment,” thinks the Fourteenth Amendment ought to protect.13 That is so because “[t]he generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions . . . . ”14 One would think that sentence would continue: “. . . and therefore they provided for a means by which the People could amend the Constitution,” or perhaps “. . . and therefore they left the creation of additional liberties, such as the freedom to marry someone of the same sex, to the People, through the never-ending process of legislation.” But no. What logically follows, in the majority’s judge-empowering estimation, is: “and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”15

The “we,” needless to say, is the nine of us. “History and tradition guide and discipline [our] inquiry but do not set its outer boundaries.”16 Thus, rather than focusing on the People’s understanding of “liberty”—at the time of ratification or even today—the majority focuses on four “principles and traditions” that, in the majority’s view, prohibit States from defining marriage as an institution consisting of one man and one woman.17

This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ “reasoned judgment.”

A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.

Judges are selected precisely for their skill as lawyers; whether they reflect the policy views of a particular constituency is not (or should not be) relevant. Not surprisingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section of America. Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers18 who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans19), or even a Protestant of any denomination.

The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not. And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.

II

But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003.20 They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds—minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly—could not. They are certain that the People ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to bestow on them the power to remove questions from the democratic process when that is called for by their “reasoned judgment.” These Justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago,21 cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.

The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so.22 Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent. “The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.”23 (Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie. Expression, sure enough, is a freedom, but anyone in a long-lasting marriage will attest that that happy state constricts, rather than expands, what one can prudently say.) Rights, we are told, can “rise . . . from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.”24 (Huh? How can a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives [whatever that means] define [whatever that means] an urgent liberty [never mind], give birth to a right?) And we are told that, “[i]n any particular case,” either the Equal Protection or Due Process Clause “may be thought to capture the essence of [a] right in a more accurate and comprehensive way,” than the other, “even as the two Clauses may converge in the identification and definition of the right.”25 (What say? What possible “essence” does substantive due process “capture” in an “accurate and comprehensive way”? It stands for nothing whatever, except those freedoms and entitlements that this Court really likes.  And the Equal Protection Clause, as employed today, identifies nothing except a difference in treatment that this Court really dislikes. Hardly a distillation of essence. If the opinion is correct that the two clauses “converge in the identification and definition of [a] right,” that is only because the majority’s likes and dislikes are predictably compatible.) I could go on. The world does not expect logic and precision in poetry or inspirational pop philosophy; it demands them in the law. The stuff contained in today’s opinion has to diminish this Court’s reputation for clear thinking and sober analysis.

* * *

Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before a fall. The Judiciary is the “least dangerous” of the federal branches because it has “neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm” and the States, “even for the efficacy of its judgments.”26 With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the “reasoned judgment” of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.

Shall We, Under the Constitution, Govern Ourselves? Or, Shall We Be Ruled Under Tyranny?

 (This is Part II of a Blog evaluation of the recent federal appeals court decision holding that the tax imposed for failing to purchase health insurance did not violate the Origination Clause of the Constitution. You can read Part I, in which the decision is summarized, here.  Here, I raise old questions about the nature of our government and about the existence of a putative duty of citizens to respect decisions of a federal court that purport to interpret and apply one of the fundamental documents of the Nation, the United States Constitution.)

As previously explained, the DC Circuit has rejected a constitutional challenge to the tax imposed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  That challenge asserted that the tax violated the Origination Clause of the Constitution because the legislation imposing it originated in the Senate, rather than the House of Representatives.  In my previous post, I concluded:  “For now, it would seem that the Origination Clause theory is in trouble.”

Perhaps it is in bad form to open a conversation with a litany of questions.  Nonetheless, we face the consequences of a lazy Congress, a tyrannical president, and an unhistorical court decision.  A few questions are, I think, a good way to frame our circumstances.

Should the Origination Clause challenge to the tax imposed for failing to purchase health insurance fail?

Should the decision of three appointed judges bind a Nation and its People to their determination of these intertwined issues?

Should the Origination Clause be understood to apply only to those bills about which the Congress entertained “raising revenue” as its animating purpose and intention? 

These questions, how we examine them, how we answer them, decide more than the constitutionality of the Act.  Rather, what we say about these questions, the principles we bring to bear on them, reveal much about how we, as a People, have progressed under the Constitution, how we have learned the lessons of the setting up of, and governance of, our Nation.

Are we bound to bow to the conclusions reached by three judges in this matter? Do a federal court’s neat machinations around the Origination Clause literally command the heartfelt obedience and respect of us all?  To that decision, as free people under this Constitution, do we owe some kind of fealty?

The answer to each of these questions might be “yes,” but I think the proper answer to each is “no.”

By saying “no,” I join Abraham Lincoln in rejecting a judicial power to set policy for the Nation, and in rejecting the notion that construction and interpretation of the Constitution is the sole province of the Judicial Branch.

In his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln concluded that the Supreme Court, if its decisions resolved questions of national policy conclusively, would supplant the People as their own governors.  As a People, have we actually come to the place that Abraham Lincoln forecast over 150 years ago?  Then, as the nation reeled from its battles over regulation or prohibition of slavery and over the legal theory of secession from the Union, the Supreme Court took a swipe at the policy-making and legislative power of the People, exercised through the Congress, when it decided Dred Scott versus Sanford. 

Dred Scott had lived most of his life in the service of a military doctor and his wife. In the course of that service, Scott had lived in States that recognized the right to own slaves and in States that prohibited slavery and rejected the idea of ownership of one man by another.

In Dred Scott, the Court rejected Scott’s claim that, because he had resided in Free States while under the ownership of his master, he had, in fact, become a free man.  So, in essence and in fact, the Court rejected Scott’s claim to freedom.  The Supreme Court -- ever the beacon of human rights and liberty -- concluded that Africans in America were not citizens of the United States, could not, in fact, be citizens of this Nation.  Consequentially, the Court concluded that Scott lacked standing to sue in federal court.  On the substantive question, the Court concluded that restrictions on owning and importing slaves -- imposed on federally administered territories prior to their admission to the Union as States – had been beyond the power of the Congress to impose. 

The upshot of the matter:  Scott’s case was dismissed.  More importantly, the decision resolved two important questions of constitutional construction.  As a consequence important policy questions arising from the dispute among the States over slavery were, seemingly, placed beyond the power of the People, through their Legislatures, to address.

That result, of great moment to People who would govern their own affairs, inspired Lincoln’s observation of an eminent tribunal, the Supreme Court, displacing the People in the affairs of policy making.  In his Address, faced with resolutions of secession and threats imminent to federal offices and officers within the Southern States, Lincoln would not avoid addressing these same central issues of policy purportedly put beyond republican amelioration by the Dred Scott decision.

Lincoln observed the none-too-subtle shift of the locus of power accomplished by settling upon the Court a legitimized power to impose policy by simply deciding case: 

A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it, does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

I do not forget the position assumed by some, that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court; nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case, upon the parties to a suit; as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be over-ruled, and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink, to decide cases properly brought before them; and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes.

As Lincoln observed, in its deciding of Dred Scott, by arrogating to itself the power to interpret the Constitution as its exclusive province, the Supreme Court denied to the Congress a power to regulate slavery in federally administered territories.  In doing so, it stripped the People of the United States of the power to be their own governors in this particular.  Thus, as he said, to that extent the People will have surrendered that power into the hands of that “eminent tribunal.” 

Lincoln, ever a gentleman, did not call out the justices of the Court as fabricators.  In fact, his address portrays the Court as having no choice in the matter but to decide the cases before it:  “Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink, to decide cases properly brought before them; and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes.”   Without imputing to Honest Abe a lack of candor regarding his views on the Court’s obligations, his words suggest a mechanical, preference-free, dispensation of justice.  Lincoln’s caution in the moment has not restrained others to make more candid observations.

Mark DeWolfe Howe, attorney and historian, rendered one of the most disturbing indictments of the Supreme Court’s decision making process with which I am familiar.  Howe, lecturing at Harvard Law School, responded to the Court’s decisions on religion and the law.  The lectures, given in the early 1960’s, became the basis of his book, “The Garden and the Wilderness.” As Howe set the stage for his exploration of the Court’s Religion Clause cases, he first addressed the roles played by the justices in deciding cases. 

Of course, their principal roles were as judges of the Nation’s highest tribunal.  In reaching their decisions, Howe noted, the justices often also took on the role of historians.  In his view, however, the justices as historians often subverted history in service of intended outcomes. 

Howe began his consideration of the Religion Clause decisions by demonstrating that the Court’s choice to pick a metaphor – the wall of separation between church and state – was, in fact, the Court’s choice to pick an outcome.  More, by focusing on Jefferson’s Wall of Separation, the Court put its historical and juridical focus on the history of the struggle for religious freedom in Virginia. By doing so, the Court imported to the meaning of the Religion Clause the peculiarities of Virginia’s struggle.  Indeed, the Court vaunted the Virginia struggle for religious liberty over every other possible source of meaning for the Religion Clauses.

Howe examined the intersection of those two roles played by Supreme Court justices:

Among the stupendous powers of the Supreme Court of the United States, there are two which in logic may be independent and yet in fact are related.  The one is the power, through an articulate search for principle, to interpret history.  The other is the power, through the disposition of cases, to make it.  Phrased somewhat differently, the contrast which I have in mind is that between the scholar’s capacity to conduct a groping search for past even and initial purpose and the statesman’s talent for making the decisive choice of a rule of conduct which he believes to be suitable for the government of the future.

Howe suggests that a justice may be a scholar and a statesman of a kind, but that, in rendering decisions, the risk is real that a justice can, in fact, become a policy-maker designing our lives under the framework of law.  He continues:

It is the common-law tradition, perhaps, which leads the Court and those who study its processes to assume (or had I better say “pretend”?) that the history which is made by the Court’s decisions is merely the realization of the past which the learning of the justices and their clerks has uncovered.  The judge as statesman, purporting to be the servant of the judge as historian, often asks us to believe that the choices that he makes –the rules of law that he establishes for the nation—are the dictates of a past which his abundant and uncommitted scholarship has discovered.

From these thoughts, Howe contemplates that a reasonable reader will have sensed in his words doubt of the Court’s adequacy in interpreting our nation’s history.  If the reader has done so, Howe explains, it is likely the product of the reader realizing the intention of the writer:

I believe that in the matters at issue the Court has too often pretended that the dictates of the nation’s history, rather than the mandates of its own will, compelled a particular decision.  By superficial and purposive interpretations of the past, the Court has dishonored the arts of the historian and degraded the talents of the lawyer.  Such dishonoring and degrading may not be of large moment when the history that the Court manipulates is merely “legal history”—the story, that is, of the law’s internal growth and development.  When, however, the Court endeavors to write an authoritative chapter in the intellectual history of the American people, as it does when it lays historical foundations beneath its readings of the First Amendment, then any distortion becomes a matter of consequence.

That is, indeed, a telling indictment of Supreme Court decision-making processes in the Religion Cases from the late 1940s forward.  The indictment applies, I think, with equal weight to Judith Rogers’ opinion for the DC Circuit on the Origination Clause, and her application of her construction of the Origination Clause to Matt Sissel’s challenge to the tax imposed under the individual mandate.  

There is no clause of the Constitution assigning to the Supreme Court the power or duty to construe the Constitution in a manner conclusive of constructions given to that document by the Congress or by the President. If you doubt it, read Article III of the Constitution for yourself. Today, of course, few dispute the Court’s pre-eminent authority to do so, even in the absence of an express designation of such a duty or power.  That outcome might have surprised some delegates at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, but would not have surprised Alexander Hamilton, the author of the Federalist No. 78.

Although the delegates to the Constitutional Convention agreed to conduct their sessions in secret, several attendees took notes, and a number of speeches, in addition, were rendered from written manuscripts.  Together the notes and speeches give us the opportunity to listen in as the Convention considered how to make “a more perfect Union.”

Early in the Convention, James Madison’s proposal, “The Virginia Plan,” was offered for the consideration of the delegates then present.  Among the points proposed was one to create a council that would, essentially, sit in judgment of congressional acts to determine their constitutionality and wisdom.  This text explains the point proposed:

“Resolved that the Executive and a convenient number of the National Judiciary, ought to compose a Council of revision with authority to examine every act of the National Legislature before it shall operate, and every act of a particular Legislature before a Negative thereon shall be final; and that the dissent of the said Council shall amount to a rejection, unless the Act of the National Legislature be again passed, or that of a particular Legislature be again negatived by — of the members of each branch.”

Note that Madison expressly proposed including members of the federal judiciary on a Council to provide a pre-operative clearance for federal legislation. This proposal was rejected, not just once, but on three separate occasions.  The only provision of the Constitution that approached it was the grant of the veto power to the Executive, itself subject to override by two thirds votes of each Chamber of the Congress.

Unfortunately, for truth and for history, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention pledged themselves to secrecy regarding their proceedings.  As a consequence, no general awareness existed amongst the People and the States that this idea – a “super-legislature” that could sit in judgment of the constitutionality of the Acts of the Congress and the laws of the States – had been rejected three times in the considerations of the Convention.  Despite the rejection of the idea of a “council of revision,” delegates did argue that the structure of the Constitution supported the notion that the federal courts would have authority to decide such questions of constitutionality, and the idea of such a power was also the subject of debate in the Ratification Conventions of the States.

I would not want to leave you with the notion that this power, the judicial power to declare an act of Congress void, or to interpret the meaning of the Constitution, was novel and never considered by the Convention that framed the Constitution, or the State Conventions that ratified it.  Rather, it is sufficient to note that there is a history to this question of the power of constitutional interpretation, and to note that wiser minds than mine have disputed that it is the sole or exclusive province of the Courts to do so.

Beyond the veil of secrecy for the Convention, there was also the campaign of propaganda related to the debates in the States over ratification.  That propaganda war, principally consisting of published letters by opposing factions of Federalists and Anti-Federalists, served to educate the People as to the proposed meaning of the Constitution, its purpose, its strengths, its weaknesses and its dangers. 

One Constitutional Convention delegate, Robert Yates, took the Antifederalist position during the debates of the States on ratification.  In his eleventh essay opposing the Constitution, writing under his nom du plum “Brutus,” explained the danger of depositing the sole power of construing the Constitution in the Judicial Branch:

“[I]n their decisions they will not confine themselves to any fixed or established rules, but will determine, according to what appears to them, the reason and spirit of the constitution. The opinions of the supreme court, whatever they may be, will have the force of law; because there is no power provided in the constitution, that can correct their errors, or controul their adjudications. From this court there is no appeal.” 

Arguing for the Constitution, and seeking to mollify fears that a power of judicial review would make the Judicial Branch central and powerful to the federal government, Alexander Hamilton expressed the view that, to the contrary, the Judiciary would least likely present threats to the rights and liberties of the people:

“Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”

Among those wiser minds, in addition to Lincoln, and delegate Robert Yates, Jefferson is particularly notable.  His thoughts on this power of the judiciary and his conclusion of its danger to self-government he expressed in a letter to William Jarvis, written in 1820.  Jarvis had provided to Jefferson a copy of his book, “Republican.”  Having given the book a cursory examination initially, Jefferson chose to address the question of the power of judicial review in his letter of appreciation for the book.  He wrote: 

“You seem … to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is ‘[a good judge expands his power],’ and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control.

The constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves. []

[T]he constitution, in keeping three departments distinct and independent, restrains the authority of the judges to judiciary organs, as it does the executive and legislative to executive and legislative organs. The judges certainly have more frequent occasion to act on constitutional questions, because the laws of [private property] and of criminal action, forming the great mass of the system of law, constitute their particular department. When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity. The exemption of the judges from that is quite dangerous enough.

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

Still, while maintaining the respect of those who studied the records of the Convention, of the Ratification Conventions and of the public dialogue of the Federalist and the Anti-Federalists, one could yet hold the view that the Judicial Branch did not own the Constitution, nor possess the sole power to construe it, nor the power to declare the Acts of the Congress or of the State legislatures null and void. Ultimately, such a view notwithstanding, the Supreme Court, in a series of decisions, arrogated to itself the power to interpret the Constitution as the final arbiter of its meaning, and the powers to declare federal and state laws unconstitutional.

Professor Howe, in the lectures mentioned above, nonetheless counsels us that we are not the mere pupils of a history drafted and crafted by judges.  Instead, as to the general history of our People, of our government, and of our founding, we have judgment equal in significance to that of judges.  What remains, then, is for we, the People, to consider whether Judge Judith Rogers and her colleagues correctly construed the Origination Clause and correctly applied that Clause to the challenge to the individual mandate penalty under Obamacare.