By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
The history that Democrats tell themselves about Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s attempt at Court-packing is that it worked after all, because it
acted as an effective threat. The Court had been striking down a variety of New
Deal programs FDR believed essential to national recovery from the Great
Depression. The administration convinced itself that a Republican-dominated
Court would destroy them. And they concocted a pretext for their ideologically
motivated expansionism: “overcrowded federal court dockets.”
FDR’s bill for judicial reform went down as an
embarrassing legislative defeat and example of overreach for the president. But
almost immediately, a series of rulings beginning with West Coast Hotel v.
Parrish seemed to demonstrate that Justice Owen Roberts had changed
definitively from a swing vote that often went against the president’s programs
to a swing vote in favor of them. Justice Roberts, consciously or not, was saving
the Court from the resentment of FDR and the populace at large, it is
explained.
I wonder if the drama can be recapitulated today, as
kabuki theater. It would be staged to smooth over the intra-coalition politics
of the Democratic Party. Joe Biden is against Court-packing and ran against it.
He refuses to say whether he endorses it, because it’s incredibly unpopular.
Less than a third of respondents told Pew they believed the Supreme Court was
dominated by conservatives. But influential progressives in the House and
particularly in prestige media are for Court-packing. By making a fuss about
Court-packing, and then having Senate Democrats talk incessantly about the
threat of a highly-unlikely-to-succeed challenge to Obamacare, Democrats can
claim to have successfully threatened the conservatives on the Court. By doing
this, they pull the party back from the intellectuals urging on a fateful and
unpopular Court-packing scheme that would derail the party’s more pressing
agenda items.
There’s only one problem. The play is running in reverse.
A doubtless very different Justice Roberts has been trying to save the Court’s
reputation among Democrats for a decade now. The political drama around and
within the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings demonstrates that this
gambit has failed. John Roberts’ attempt to shore up the legitimacy of the
Court has backfired, inviting the very escalation it was calculated to avoid
and making him a figure of ridicule among those who would otherwise admire him.
When the question of whether it was constitutional for
the federal government to use the Affordable Care Act to compel citizens to
purchase a health insurance policy or face a penalty came before the Supreme
Court, it came as the chief legislative accomplishment of the first term of the
first African-American president, the most popular political figure to emerge
in American life since Ronald Reagan. It came with endless blogposts at The
Washington Post saying that the whole structure of the Affordable Care Act
depended on the enforceability of this mandate and its fines. It also came as
the product of humiliating political horse-trading and promiscuous expansions
of the authority of HHS over American life – rife with embarrassing drafting
errors (a problem for textualists!) and backed by the curious argument that the
federal government’s power to regulate interstate economic activity granted the
government the power to regulate and punish a very specific form of individual
economic inactivity.
Roberts wrote the opinion that vindicated the law, one
that everyone else on the Court (and many outside) seemed to disdain. He
rewrote the penalty as a tax. He just pretended that something the government
probably couldn’t do under the Constitution – compel individuals to purchase
items – was something else entirely, levying a tax. He did this to preserve
respect for the Court among Democrats. And maybe he hoped that this act of
“judicial modesty” would encourage Congress to take up its own constitutional
role and defer fewer questions to the Court.
A few years, elections, and regular changes later, and
what is the result? The mandate/tax was reduced to zero dollars. The experts
saying it was an inseparable part of the logic of the Affordable Care Act are
publicly recanting. A substantial slice of elite opinion is now for
Court-packing to smash Republicans, something they would not have considered at
the time of Roberts’ ruling. And the very likely next justice on the Court, Amy
Coney Barrett, is being questioned about the remarks she made in 2017
disparaging Roberts’ decision.
Describing her mentor Justice Scalia’s view, Barrett
wrote, “it is illegitimate for the Court to distort either the Constitution or
a statute to achieve what it deems a preferable result” and seemed to endorse
the assessment that Roberts had “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its
plausible meaning to save the statute.”
Roberts could have separated the individual mandate and
struck it down, remaining faithful to both his convictions about the
Constitution and his philosophy of judicial modesty. Democrats would have
yelped, and indeed, Obama may have made the Court a focus of his ire. But
Congress either could have sought some other mechanism to accomplish the same
end, or it could have lived with the result and discovered years earlier that
their legislation could accomplish its most important goals without
transgressing the Constitution.
Instead, by advertising his ability to be swayed to
preserve the good opinion of Democrats, he dramatically incentivized Democrats
to writhe around like an Italian soccer player when given slightest brushback
and threaten the judiciary like FDR. Now elite media fills up with lamentations
about the most right-wing Court ever, even as that Court’s “right wing” imposes
part of the unpassable Equality Act by rewriting LBJ-era legislation.
Roberts’ attempt to gain respect for the Court has
backfired. Which should remind us to anticipate paradoxical effects. Barrett’s
debut on the Court will be met with the rending of Handmaid garments, but we
may look back on it in the future and see it as the start of progressives
learning to accept the primacy of Congress in the American tradition, and
recall that the Constitution is also their friend if they will let it be one.
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