This article appears in the August 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
In just a one-week span in June, the Supreme Court dealt several terrific blows to American freedom and self-government. It overturned a century-old New York law restricting the concealed carry of firearms; it overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing about 26 states to ban abortion, with more to come if Republicans win the congressional midterms; and it sharply limited the ability for the executive branch to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, which could eventually hamstring the administrative apparatus that has governed the United States for well over a century.
The Court also recently agreed to hear a case on the “independent state legislature doctrine,” which holds that state legislatures have total power over their electoral systems. If the ruling goes conservatives’ way again, it would allow gerrymandered Republican legislatures to hand the presidency to their own party in 2024, striking another blow against democracy itself.
This disaster is being perpetrated by perhaps the least democratically legitimate Supreme Court in history. Five of the six right-wing justices were appointed by presidents who took office after losing the popular vote. The other, Clarence Thomas, is married to an avowed conservative activist who actively agitated to overturn the 2020 election. In 2016, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell held one seat open for a year, in violation of all precedent and the text of the Constitution, to ensure his preferred replacement. Republicans have had a Court majority since the Nixon administration, even though they have won the presidential popular vote just once since 1989.
The inexorable march of tradition and timidity on the part of the government’s other branches has given this pack of conservative apparatchiks what amounts to monarchical powers over the American people. It’s no wonder that their decisions are so terrible—and so ominous for the country’s future.
What is to be done? I propose to attack the problem at the root and abolish judicial review. The Court does not have the sole power to interpret the Constitution, nor the power to strike down any law it choses, and it’s time to say so.
Even fairly hard-bitten progressives are often unsettled by this idea. Most Americans learn in high school civics that the Supreme Court gets final say on whether laws are constitutional, and that this is core to the functioning of the constitutional system.
Yet this view is incomplete. Judicial review does not appear in the Constitution and is not firmly rooted in American tradition. For roughly the first three-quarters of the 19th century and the middle third of the 20th, those powers were heavily circumscribed by tradition and competition from the other branches of government. And for good reason: When the Court has exercised sole power to interpret the Constitution, with rare exceptions it has used that power to obliterate Americans’ constitutional rights, uphold white supremacy, and protect abusive corporations from unions and the regulatory state.
While challenging the judiciary is commonly associated with Andrew Jackson, the two best presidents in history, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, had no choice but to directly confront the Court in order to advance justice. If America does not follow their lead, presidential powers will evaporate along with those of Congress and the freedom of the American people.
LET ME BEGIN WITH THE TEXT of the Constitution. It grants by far the most formal authority to Congress—the power to tax, regulate foreign trade and interstate commerce, coin money, declare war, create patents and a post office, and much else. The president executes the laws as written by Congress, serves as commander in chief of the military, and conducts foreign policy.
The Supreme Court, by contrast, only has “judicial Power” that “shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority.”
As often in the Constitution, this is exceptionally vague, but as far as the Court being able to overturn acts of Congress, the justices arrogated that privilege to themselves in Marbury v. Madison in 1803.
Though some founders, like Alexander Hamilton, did argue in favor of judicial review, support was by no means unanimous. As historian Michael Kammen explains in A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture, Marbury was highly controversial at the time and remained so for decades, which restricted judicial review in practice. “[It] is not widely appreciated,” Kammen writes, “that the procedure and its supporting doctrine developed gradually, was used sparingly for almost a century, and has never lacked critics who were both harsh and astute: Presidents Jefferson, Monroe, Jackson, and Van Buren, for example.”
One of the few times during the antebellum period the Court did exercise judicial review in a high-profile case, the resulting controversy was so explosive it helped touch off the Civil War. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Chief Justice Roger B. Taney infamously ruled that African Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and added for good measure that the carefully constructed Missouri Compromise—which had kept a rough balance of power between slave and free states, and banned slavery from the territories—was unconstitutional, even though it had nothing to do with the specifics of the case.
This was a raw exercise of political power. Taney was a partisan Democrat, defender of slavery, and die-hard racist, and was using rule-by-decree in an attempt to settle the slavery question in favor of the planter class. The Constitution didn’t enter into the equation.
Judicial review does not appear in the Constitution and is not firmly rooted in American tradition.
But the rest of the country did not submit to Taney’s despotism. Northern voters and leaders reacted with furious outrage, and multiple state legislatures passed measures defying the Court. Arguments against Dred Scott and the lawless Court were a central part of the new Republican Party’s messaging, and in Lincoln’s 1860 campaign for president.
In his inaugural address, Lincoln directly attacked judicial review: “[T]he 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 people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” In this, Lincoln followed the thinking of Jefferson, who argued that judicial review makes the Constitution “a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”
Lincoln got to the core of the problem. Under a strong form of judicial review, the Court has despotic powers by definition. Congress and the president theoretically check one another, and more importantly have to face voters at regular intervals. But justices are appointed, serve for life, can overrule both the legislature and the president, and can’t be removed from office aside from impeachment (which, as Donald Trump proved beyond any question, is virtually a dead letter in our hyper-partisan times). Indeed, the Court doesn’t even have an ethics code of any kind. It would be completely legal for a justice to hold an auction for his or her vote outside the Court building.
During the war, Taney attempted to reverse President Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, despite the fact that the Constitution explicitly authorizes doing so “in Cases of Rebellion.” Taney then tried to hold Gen. George Cadwalader in contempt for refusing to obey his ruling. Both times, the Lincoln administration ignored him. As the president pointed out in a later message to Congress, Taney’s tendentious nitpicking would destroy the foundations of the Constitution itself: “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?” (That said, Lincoln still got Congress to pass a law supporting his action once it came back into session, just for good measure.)
Unfortunately, this spirit did not last. Supreme Court highlights of the Gilded Age included tossing the convictions of white supremacist mass murderers for violating their victims’ civil rights (United States v. Cruikshank), giving legal sanction to Jim Crow apartheid (Plessy v. Ferguson), inventing the idea of corporate personhood without even providing an argument for it (Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad), and spending 40 years striking down any economic regulation that interfered with the free market (most notably in Lochner v. New York).
The Lochner era extended through the early New Deal period, when the Court struck down several of President Roosevelt’s attempts to fight the Depression, leading him to propose a measure to add additional justices to the Court in 1937. The plan did not pass, but shortly after FDR proposed it, conservative Justice Owen Roberts switched his position to upholding New Deal laws. Though historians debate how much Roberts was motivated by FDR’s plan, the president’s goal was accomplished, and for the next couple of decades the Court was relatively sparing with its review powers. Once again, fighting American history’s greatest calamities required bringing the Court to heel.
ONE OF THE WORST ASPECTS of judicial review is that it ultimately corrupts law itself. By placing constitutional interpretation in the hands of a council of unaccountable ideologues, the temptation to use that power for political purposes is overwhelming. The very idea that it is possible to interpret language or assemble facts in a neutral fashion gives way to fabricated reasons why the Constitution mandates whatever specific political goal the justices happen to have.
To be sure, there has been one period of a couple decades when the Court was a force for good, from striking down segregation in Brown v. Board of Education to establishing the right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade. However, these actions were not nearly as effective as legislation—the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act actually ended Jim Crow, not Brown, and in any case half the reason Jim Crow got going can be attributed to the Court itself, through Plessy. Furthermore, deciding questions of medical policy should be a matter for Congress; we’re seeing today the fragility of judicially established protections that can be torn up one by one.
Today, an entrenched conservative majority, lifetime appointments, the de rigueur trend of strategic retirement, and the distortions of the Electoral College mean that the Court is all but immune from democratic accountability. It has not sunk in yet among many liberals, especially the Democratic Party leadership, how doomed they are under the status quo. Absent aggressive reform, it is vanishingly unlikely that Democrats will get a majority on the Court for the foreseeable future.
An editorial cartoon from February 1937 depicts President Franklin Roosevelt and the Court.
The majority simply has to hold on long enough for Republicans to win the Senate and the presidency, in which case the oldest members can retire. To break this majority, Democrats would have to hold the presidency continuously for something like 20 years, which hasn’t happened since the New Deal. In the meantime, the Court has been hacking away at the voting rights of liberal demographics, making it hard for Democrats to maintain state legislative or House majorities. If they aren’t stopped, another Plessy-style decision blessing an updated version of Jim Crow is coming soon.
Groups like Demand Justice have opted to advocate for adding justices as a reform solution. Packing the Court is completely in keeping with previous law and tradition; indeed, it was FDR’s preferred option. But at bottom, it would preserve the principle of judicial review, while mostly abolishing it in a cumbersome manner with an unclear resolution.
Changing the makeup of the Court by stacking it with partisans would still leave the judicial branch free to overturn laws, but only with the approval of whichever party held Congress and the White House last. If Democrats pack the Court, Republicans will of course return the favor at the earliest possible moment. Under such a system, ultimately it will be elections that settle questions of constitutional law. If that is the objective, it is both more honest and dramatically easier to simply attack judicial review head-on.
SO WHAT WOULD THIS MEAN in practice? A current or future president, in response to some particularly egregious Supreme Court diktat, would explain their problems with the ruling, and insist that they will not obey the decision. They would say that in their opinion, Marbury v. Madison was wrongly decided, that the Court does not get to claim sole power to interpret the Constitution, and that the Constitution has no stipulation about the U.S. being a judicial dictatorship. From now on, if Congress, for example, directs the president to regulate air pollution, then they will do as instructed, rather than obeying the Court’s wishes.
Now, this would likely end in a direct confrontation between the president and the Court, with one commanding the power of the judiciary and the other the federal bureaucracy and the military. But while the possibility of such a conflict is alarming, it would only bring into the open what is already happening—a straight-up contest for political power that has nothing to do with the law.
What might the endgame look like? It would probably resolve into something similar to what we see in other rich democracies that have not allowed their governments to become dangerously imbalanced in favor of the judiciary. While constitutional courts or other systems of theoretical judicial review do exist in many peer countries (and they have gotten somewhat stronger over the years, particularly in the European Union), none of them have anything close to America’s brand of hyper-powerful Supreme Court.
The Nordic countries, for instance, have some formal processes of judicial review, but outside of Norway the tradition of parliamentary supremacy is so strong that they are virtually never used, and even the Supreme Court of Norway is far less powerful than the country’s parliament. The U.K. and New Zealand do have a formal review process for the courts, but only for acts of public bodies—they cannot strike down legislation.
Australia’s High Court has nominal powers similar to its American counterpart, but in practice has hesitated to exercise them to nearly the same degree. Germany does have a fairly powerful Federal Constitutional Court—but wouldn’t you know it, that means it struggles with some of the same problems as the U.S., like when that court struck down a law legalizing abortion in 1993. (Still, even this court is not nearly as aggressive or powerful as its American counterpart.)
No other functioning democracy has anything like the wretched American spectacle of the last decade, where minority interest groups spend millions trying to get through the courts what they could not get through the legislature, and the people wait on tenterhooks during each session of the top court to see which of their freedoms might vanish next. And we don’t have to live with that.
The risk of theoretically unconstrained congressional majorities must be set against the current fact of the Court steadily stealing the powers of Congress.
Reversing what can seem like an iron law of judicial supremacy in the U.S. is admittedly hard to imagine happening. But there are also options that stop short of this. As Joshua Zeitz recently suggested at Politico, Congress could limit judicial review over certain issues. Or it could add a supermajority requirement for the Court to overturn laws or take away previously granted constitutional rights. Indeed, Article III states that the Supreme Court holds appellate jurisdiction in all cases, but “with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
Again, this is practically equivalent to my suggestion—if Congress were to just append jurisdiction-stripping language to every law, as it has done in a handful of cases in the past, judicial review would be ended. But if preserving a scrap of tradition is necessary to get people behind the basic idea, so be it.
Finally, as the Prospect has written previously, on issues of statutory interpretation Congress can counteract the Court, if they disagree with its findings, simply by clarifying statutory language to reassert their prerogatives. (Indeed, one factor enabling the current power of the Court is paralysis in Congress, which makes such simple language fixes extremely difficult.)
The key thing is to attack the Court head-on. The other branches cannot just sit there and take the arrant fake-legal decrees, because that will only embolden the justices. The plain and undeniable fact is that unfettered judicial review is a violation of basic principles of American democracy, and no court can be trusted with it.
Under any government, there is always a danger of its power being abused. Democratically elected legislatures are not immune from this problem. It must be admitted that, should Republicans take control of Congress and the White House without any constraint from the Court, there’s a strong chance they’d pass all manner of abusive stuff. The Florida legislature, for example, recently passed a bigoted “don’t say gay” bill that blatantly violates the civil rights of LGBT teachers.
But the risk of theoretically unconstrained congressional majorities must be set against the current fact of the Court steadily stealing the powers of Congress, eroding the freedom of the people—and, of course, doing nothing to protect gay Florida teachers from a feral state legislature. It’s far from the first time American courts have ignored the Bill of Rights, and it won’t be the last.
The relevant question when it comes to constitutional design is what kinds of government institutions are most likely to abuse their power. Common sense and history teach us that elected representatives who must seek re-election at regular intervals are the least likely to abuse their power. Totally unaccountable courts where the judges can essentially pick their successors have much greater opportunity.
A judicial system that limits itself to adjudicating criminal and civil cases, and making sure that legislation is interpreted consistently, can fill a necessary and proper role. The Supreme Court, drunk on unchecked power for too long, must be brought to heel.
