The Supreme Court’s 1936 decision in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. upheld the validity of a joint resolution (equivalent to a statute) authorizing the President, by proclamation, to make illegal the selling of arms to combatants in a conflict between Bolivia and Paraguay. Justice Sutherland’s opinion for the Court framed the issue by assuming, for the sake of argument, that the congressional delegation of authority would be invalid if it only involved internal affairs, and then asking whether the foreign relations context made a difference. His answer was that it made all the difference, for two main reasons. First, the context was one of concurrent presidential authority over external affairs, in which the President enjoys special powers to act as “sole organ of the federal government in foreign relations.” Second, the government as a whole possessed the relevant powers as inherent concomitants of external sovereignty. These points both implied that the standards of valid delegation were more capacious than in domestic affairs.
Continue reading ““The Union Existed Before the Constitution””Category: Supreme Court of the United States
Bostock and the tyranny of values
In a characteristically insightful essay, Vincent Clarke connects the textualism of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County with the postmodern project of deconstruction, typified by the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Clarke observes that Derrida’s development of deconstruction was an attempt to make more effective Martin Heidegger’s attempt to demolish Western metaphysics. For Heidegger, metaphysics had to be destroyed to make room for a new approach to the experiences that became being. Derrida proposed a more effective mechanism for the same process. It is concerning, of course, from a theological and philosophical perspective to see postmodernism take hold in the Supreme Court. But there are other reasons for concern. Carl Schmitt’s 1959 lecture, The Tyranny of Values, argues that value philosophy runs to fill the void left by the destruction of metaphysics—with the gravest consequences for the state.
Continue reading “Bostock and the tyranny of values”DACA and Leadership
In Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, 591 U.S. ____ (2020), Chief Justice John Roberts struck down the actions of the Department of Homeland Security revoking the prior administrative actions popularly known as “DACA” (“Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals”). The DACA program, established in 2012 and expanded in 2014, allows individuals who came to the United States illegally as children to defer their deportation and, having done so, regularize their immigration status. The program came to include access to benefits. Shortly after President Trump took office in 2017, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded its DACA orders. The Supreme Court struck down these rescissions, not as exceeding the government’s power, but as failing to comply perfectly with the Administrative Procedure Act.
Continue reading “DACA and Leadership”McGirt and the Patchwork of American Sovereignties
The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in McGirt v. Oklahoma, has garnered a flurry of breathless headlines and commentary describing the court’s decision as “reshap[ing] criminal justice in eastern Oklahoma by preventing state authorities from prosecuting Native Americans.”1 This statement is misleading, as Congress, in the Major Crimes Act of 1885, placed within the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government the prosecution for felonies such as murder, assault, arson, burglary, or robbery committed by an Indian on reservation territory. Indeed, in affirming the constitutionality of the Major Crimes Act, the Supreme Court found that Indians “owe no allegiance to the States, and receive from them no protection.” United States v. Kagama, 118 U.S. 375, 384, 6 S. Ct. 1109, 1114 (1886). What the majority opinion, authored by Justice Gorsuch and joined by the so-called “liberal” justices, has done is actually quite “conservative.”
Continue reading “McGirt and the Patchwork of American Sovereignties”
The Ministerial Exception and the Church’s Jurisdiction
In Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), the Supreme Court, in a seven to two decision, expanded the so-called ministerial exception to employment laws. In a sense, the decision is a victory for Christians (and, indeed, believers of any stripe), especially in the wake of the expansion of Title VII in Bostock v. Clayton County. The flexible, totality-of-the-circumstances standard announced by the Court will undoubtedly provide ample protection to Catholic schools. But it is worth considering the distinction between the majority’s test and the approach advocated by Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurrence, especially if one rightly views “religious liberty” as the wrong way to think about these issues.
Continue reading “The Ministerial Exception and the Church’s Jurisdiction”Fidelity and Faithfulness
A brief look at the chasm separating Chiafalo v. Washington‘s originalist interpretation of and the Founders’ intent regarding the Electoral College.
In Chiafalo v. Washington, the Supreme Court ruled today by a 7-2 vote that, in the light of “our whole experience as a Nation,” States may subject “faithless electors” — members of the Electoral College who vote for a candidate other than the one to whom they are pledged — to statutory penalties such as a monetary fine. The Framers may have expected electors to make independent judgments, but, alas! “[w]hether by choice or accident, the Framers did not reduce their thoughts about electors’ discretion to the printed page.” And “established practice,” developed since the 19th century, authorizes States to reduce electors to a pass-through mechanism. As early as 1864, the English barrister J.F. Stephen had observed acidly that “the election of the President by electors chosen by the people at large was supposed to be a security for the appointment of men of high character and ability. The security turned out to be worthless, inasmuch as for many years past, the electors have always been so completely pledged before their election that they might as well be dispensed with altogether.”
Of course “faithlessness” is ambiguous here; fidelity to the State-enforced pledge might be seen as infidelity to the original conception of the Electoral College itself, which as Stephen noted was intended by its creators and explained to the ratifiers as an independent body of notables deliberating in the public interest. Indeed, the whole line of development that culminates in Chiafalo would certainly startle the members of the Convention. As Max Farrand said of the Electoral College scheme in 1913, “of all things done in the convention the members seemed to have been prouder of that than of any other, and they seemed to regard it as having solved the problem for any country of how to choose a chief magistrate.”
If originalism is “our law,” it is apparently so in some very special, epicyclical sense that does not bar the Nation’s developing norms and traditions from so “informing” the interpretation of the written law as to essentially reverse the Framers’ publicly stated expectations about a central mechanism of the constitutional plan. One may say all sort of things to square such a result with originalism — heroic work can be and has been done with concepts like “construction” and “liquidation,” and the Court gestures briefly at the latter phrase — but the sheer amount of work one has to do merely raises questions about the value of the originalist enterprise itself, just as one might question the value of a car that must constantly be repaired. In a world in which post hoc developments can undo what was, in any rationally purposive sense, thought to be a linchpin of the constitutional plan, it is at best unclear what the force of calling oneself an “originalist” really is, or why anyone should care.
Adrian Vermeule
Revisiting Corporatism Eighty-Five Years After Schechter
Eighty-five years ago this past May, the Supreme Court struck down a statute that overhauled U.S. economic regulation according to principles promoted in a papal encyclical. The case was A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (“Schechter”),[1] the statute was the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (“NIRA”), and the encyclical was Quadragesimo anno. NIRA, and the agency it created (the National Recovery Administration (“NRA”)), represented the high tide of the U.S.’s brief experiment with corporatism.[2] To the extent NIRA is remembered at all, it is often viewed as an unwieldy, ill-conceived–but perhaps understandable–response to the Great Depression. Among right-liberals in particular, NIRA is denounced as a shameful flirtation with an un-American authoritarian continental ideology. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision striking down NIRA seems to reflect distaste with the corporatist principles underlying the statute. Since 1935, however, the specific legal grounds on which the Supreme Court invalidated NIRA have either become obsolete or called into question and, in any event, Schechter’s concerns can be avoided in future legislation. Notwithstanding the historical importance of Schechter’s death-blow to American corporatism, neither Schechter nor any other constitutional principles foreclose reinvigorated corporatist reforms, which are as needed today as they were during the Great Depression.
Continue reading “Revisiting Corporatism Eighty-Five Years After Schechter”John Roberts, Conservative
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the Ius & Iustitium series on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo, striking down Louisiana’s abortion restrictions. The contributors to Ius & Iustitium will be offering short essays focusing on different aspects of the Court’s decision. A post collecting the essays will be published at the end of the series.
The Chief Justice’s decision to concur in the judgment in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo illustrates the usual political phenomenology of conservatism as the alleged antithesis to the principles of the liberal revolutions. Jaime Balmes, one of the great Catholic political philosophers and theologians of the 19th century, described the movement of all conservative political action in an 1844 article about the rise of moderate and conservative parties in Spain:
Continue reading “John Roberts, Conservative”True and False Humility
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the Ius & Iustitium series on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo, striking down Louisiana’s abortion restrictions. The contributors to Ius & Iustitium will be offering short essays focusing on different aspects of the Court’s decision. A post collecting the essays will be published at the end of the series.
A brief observation about the problems of judicial Burkeanism: In June Medical LLC v. Russo, the Chief Justice provided the decisive fifth vote to invalidate Louisiana abortion regulations, writing that the regulations were on all fours with similar Texas abortion regulations invalidated by a 5-3 vote four years ago in Whole Womens’ Health v. Hellerstedt. Although the Chief dissented in the earlier case, he claimed that his vote in June Medical was dictated by stare decisis. In the key passage of his concurrence in the judgment, the Chief appealed to the Burkean virtue of epistemic humility:
Continue reading “True and False Humility”Edmund Burke and the Tragedy of Conservatism
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the Ius & Iustitium series on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo, striking down Louisiana’s abortion restrictions. The contributors to Ius & Iustitium will be offering short essays focusing on different aspects of the Court’s decision. A post collecting the essays will be published at the end of the series.
In his appalling invocation of the principle of stare decisis in concurring with the United States Supreme Court’s overturning of a Lousiana statute meant to call abortionists’ bluff on the claim that killing babies is “health care,” Chief Justice John Roberts quotes a famous passage of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the deference due to the wisdom of the ages. Several commentators have protested at this abuse of Burke’s principle. Thus, Yuval Levin points out that Burke himself held that precedents should only hold when they fulfill certain conditions:
Continue reading “Edmund Burke and the Tragedy of Conservatism”