Balls, Strikes and Judicial Moderation of Chief
Justice Roberts
PTKAP
If
we were to grade Chief Justice Roberts by his pronouncements on the role of a
judge, he would get high marks.
In
his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005, he
famously stated that if confirmed:
"I will remember that it's my job to call
balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat."
That
was a promise, not only to the Senate but also to the American People. It was a
promise that, if confirmed, he would interpret the law not enact legislation in
the guise of judicial decisions.
More
recently, in his dissent in the 2015 Obergefell
case he criticized the majority opinion stating:
“But this
Court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be
of no concern to us. Under the Constitution, judges have power to say what the
law is, not what it should be. The people who ratified the Constitution
authorized courts to exercise ’neither force nor will but merely judgment’.”
Consistent with these statements, Chief Justice. Roberts is
reported to consider himself a model of judicial restraint.
Notwithstanding
these high sentiments, the Roberts Court has evoked sharp criticism from
highly-knowledgeable sources. In response to the Citizens United decision, concerning financing of elections, Professor Tribe of Harvard, certainly one of our most
distinguished living constitutional scholar, on or off the court, wrote that
the decision:
"...marks a major upheaval in First Amendment law and signals the
end of whatever legitimate claim could otherwise have been made by the Roberts
Court to an incremental and minimalist approach to constitutional adjudication,
to a modest view of the judicial role vis-à-vis the political branches, or to a
genuine concern with adherence to precedent"
Professor
Waldman of NYU, in his book about gun rights
under the Second Amendment, used even stronger language referring to:
"... a hostile
judiciary, misreading history, overinterpreting text, and imposing political views in the guise of judicial philosophy."
Professor
Koppelman, of Northwestern University, commented specifically on Chief Justice.
Roberts (in a New Republic article):
“..Roberts is as much of a wild man as anyone on
the Court. He is distinctive in the things that make him wild. But if you push
the right buttons, restrained he isn't…The essence of Roberts’s restraint is this: He is less of a zealot
than his colleagues on his right. That isn’t saying much.”
The
question then is whether Chief Justice Roberts has lived up to his rhetoric or
whether the criticisms of these distinguished professors are justified.
Let
us examine this question by looking at two constitutional cases, one concerning
voting rights and the other concerning the funding of electoral campaigns, both
touching the very sinews of our democracy. One case in 2013 (Shelby County) concerned the core
provision of the Voting Rights Act which was first enacted in 1965 to implement
the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution (a post Civil War amendment). The
second case in 2009 (Citizens United)
concerned the right of the government to restrict corporate political
expenditures
SHELBY COUNTY
To
begin with Shelby County, the
fifteenth amendment states:
"The
right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged
by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous
condition of servitude…."
The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was extended
several times. Because it had been found that prohibiting specific devices,
such as literacy tests, designed to discourage voting by African Americans, or
other minority groups, merely led to the creation of new devices, the act
employed a pre-clearance mechanism.
States, or subdivisions of states, that
had a history of such discrimination became “covered jurisdictions” and could
not adopt new voting rules without obtaining a pre-clearance from the Federal
government.
In 2013 Chief Justice Roberts authored a
decision in the Shelby County case that,
in Justice Ginsburg's words, accomplished the "demolition" of that act,
one of the most successful civil-rights laws in the history of the republic.
"...the Act imposes current burdens and must be justified
by current needs...The Act also differentiates between the States, despite our
historic tradition that all the States enjoy 'equal sovereignty'...a departure
from the fundamental principle of equal sovereignty requires a showing that a
statute’s disparate geographic coverage is sufficiently related to the problem
that it targets."
1.
A law that imposes burdens, such as the
VRA pre-clearance requirement, must effectively address current problems, and
No one would argue with the sentiment
that legislation should be well designed to deal with the problems it seeks to
resolve. However, the chief Justice seems to be saying that if this is not the
case the law will be declared unconstitutional.
Could he really be saying this? Article
1, sec.1 of the Constitution states:
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of
the United States,
Cancelling legislation simply because it
is not working as well as it might is part of the legislative process. Alternatively,
Congress can decide that keeping old legislation in force, as here, is the best option available to it. It would take an extraordinary set
of facts to merit judicial intervention in such a case. Clearly, the congressional reenactment of the VRA
in 2006 was light years short of this level. The Chief Justice’s “current
burdens/current needs” test and his "equal sovereignty" test (neither
of which is mentioned in the Constitution) serve only to obscure this fact. They
are, in reality, merely slogans masquerading as constitutional principles.
The Chief Justice’s language was a
notably unsubtle invitation, and a road map, to the covered jurisdictions to
find one among them, that was not eligible to elect out of covered jurisdiction
status, to bring a suit, based on the Chief Justice’s “ tests”.
The advice was followed. Shelby County,
Alabama was the chosen jurisdiction. It was an acknowledged sinner and thus was
ineligible to bail out of covered status. It brought a suit, tailored to the
Chief Justice's specifications, asking that the pre-clearance requirement be
declared unconstitutional and permanently inoperable.
The
2006 list of covered jurisdictions was passed after extensive hearing
demonstrated to the satisfaction of the legislators that the existing
pre-clearance list was still a valid classification and would continue to be
effective. For example:
The VRA, with its list of covered
jurisdictions, was adopted with a House vote of 390 to 33 and a Senate vote of
98 to 0. President Bush signed the bill calling it:
By 2006, minority voting conditions in
the covered jurisdictions had vastly improved compared to 1965. Such conditions
were not worse in some of the covered jurisdictions than they were in some
non-covered jurisdictions.
But it was apparent from the evidence
that Congress had amassed that this was not solely due to a change of
generations and of attitudes in the covered jurisdictions. It also was due to the operations and
dissuasive effect of the pre-clearance requirement.
The report of the House Judiciary
Committee began with a lengthy summary of the improvement of voting conditions
in the covered jurisdictions since the act first was enacted in 1965 and went
on with an even lengthier summary of the extensive evidence that the act still
was needed in these jurisdictions to preserve those gains.
Chief Justice Roberts, together with the four
other conservative justices, responded by holding that the particular list of
covered jurisdictions, which had been re-adopted by the congress in 2006, was
more than forty years old, was outmoded, did not fit the current situation in
the covered jurisdictions and its use therefore was unconstitutional.
The Chief Justice, borrowing heavily
from the first part of the report and paying little attention to the second
part, described a situation where the need was not present. Without ever being
explicit on the point, the Chief Justice described at some length the improved
state of minority voting in the covered jurisdictions as if it were a
satisfactory condition kept in being by the wishes of the state and local
governments concerned and not by continued oversight by the Federal government.
Without access to any facts unknown to
Congress, and not citing any known constitutional doctrine, Chief Justice
Roberts substituted the judgment of five lawyers to that of 488 members of
congress and the president of the United States. He held that Congress ‘finding
that the covered jurisdiction list remained a valid list was incorrect and that
its continued use would be unconstitutional.
This decidedly was not calling balls and
strikes.
Congress ‘action was a proper exercise
of the legislative power. That five justices voted to overturn it
“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
A COMPARISON
It
is very difficult indeed to reconcile chief Justice Roberts ‘actions in the Shelby County matter with his admonition
of the majority in the Obergefell
case not to act as a legislature. In essence, in that case, the majority merely
held that the words of the Fourteenth Amendment:
“nor shall any State… deny to
any person within its jurisdiction the equal
meant that same-sex couples were to have
equal rights to the benefits of laws
concerning marriage as are available to opposite-sex couples. That, at the very
least, is a reasonable interpretation of the words of the Constitution. One can
agree (as I do) or disagree with the decision, but it was not making law. It
was interpreting the words of the Constitution.
Let us make a side-by-side comparison of
Chief Justice Roberts’s view that the majority in Obergefell was legislating rather than making a judicial decision
and the assertion that he, and the four other conservative justices, overtly were
doing so in Shelby County:
Obergefell
|
Shelby County
|
|
1.
Invented two new
“constitutional tests” not mentioned in the Constitution.
|
||
“Equal protection of the law” means same-sex
couples are entitled to the same benefits of laws concerning marriage as are
opposite-sex couples.
|
2.
Inserted those
“tests” in an opinion on another matter as an obvious invitation to bring a
suit attacking the VRA
|
|
.
|
3.
Without citing
additional facts, declared that Congress wrongly decided that continuing the
existing list of covered jurisdictions was justified
|
|
4.
Held that the continued use of such list would
be unconstitutional
|
I have referred above to the Chief Justice’s
actions as injecting the court into the legislative process. Now I will go
further. Overruling the congressional finding was certainly one of the most
blatant examples of judicial legislation in the history of the Supreme Court,
one that justified Thomas Jefferson’s words nearly 200 years earlier in a
letter to William Jarvis:
“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
The five justices had to know that
demolishing the VRA pre-clearance mechanism would result in many previously
covered jurisdictions adopting discriminatory voting legislation, and this
occurred. The Brennan Center for Justice of NYU School of Law reports:
“…most of the feared consequences have come to pass —
including attempts to: revive voting changes that were blocked as
discriminatory, move forward with voting changes previously deterred, and
implement new discriminatory voting restrictions.”
CITIZENS UNITED
The second case for
our examination is the 2008 Citizens
Union case where Chief Justice Roberts, joined the four other conservative
justices (he did not write the opinion), in holding that the words of the first
amendment:
"Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or
the press
to mean that the government cannot restrict
the right of corporations to spend unlimited sums to support or oppose
candidates for public office.
To
arrive at this astonishing result, the chief Justice and the four other
conservative justices had to find that corporations are people and that the
spending of money on elections is a form of speech. A holding so far removed
from the dictionary meanings of the words scarcely can be called the exercise
of judicial restraint or the calling of balls and strikes.
This
holding continues to do immense harm to our political system. The expressed
theory of the five justices who adopted it was that corporations acting
independently of any candidate should not be subject to governmental
limitations on their expenditures. Such independence is extremely easy to
counterfeit. The entirely predictable
result has been the birth of “Super Pacs sponsoring a single candidate, often
openly formed at the request of that candidate, and able to spend unlimited
sums to get the candidate elected
This
has made it nearly impossible for candidates to high office who do not have
access to huge funds to be elected. Reportedly, it has caused some members of
Congress to resign because they are faced with the necessity of spending much
of their time raising funds from their first day in office.
The New York Times
of July 10, 2015 reports that Jeb Bush already has already raised more than
$114 million, almost all of it through a super pac that Mr. Bush’s aides helped
set up.
If the
chief Justice, and the other four conservative justices did not foresee that
this would happen, they are exceedingly naïve. If they did foresee it, they
were willing to disregard he abysmal consequences. In either event, the
decision calls into question the correctness of their appointments to the
court.
It is
without doubt one of the worst decisions in the court’s history. Once more, it
recalls Jefferson’s comment which is quoted above.
SOME ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
After the end of the 2014-2015 Supreme Court
term some commentators detected a leftward trend on the court, citing King v Burwell (upholding Obamacare from a malicious attack on tissue-thin
technical grounds) and Obergefell (according constitutional protection to
same-sex marriages). The Chief Justice and Justice Kennedy voted with the four
liberal justices on the first and Justice Kennedy voted with them on the
second.
However, that does not undo the fact that The
United States is a significantly less democratic country because of the Citizens United and Shelby County decisions, and that gun violence has become a daily
occurrence in the United States due, in large measure, to the 2006 overly-broad
reading of the second amendment by the chief Justice and the other four conservative
justices in the Heller case.
The bottom line is clear. We are not
discussing a percentage game. Who would patronize
a physician who prescribed helpful treatments 96% of the time but routinely did
his patients serious harm the other 4%?
oOo
PTKAP'S other blogs concerning the Roberts court, gun control and taxation are listed on:ptkapsblogindex.blogspot.com
PTKAP'S other blogs concerning the Roberts court, gun control and taxation are listed on:ptkapsblogindex.blogspot.com
