Author Archive
Are Three Federalist Society Lawyers Threatening the Supreme Court?
In a monograph released yesterday—but not-quite-technically-endorsed by—the Federalist Society, leading NSA defenders Andrew McCarthy, David Rivkin and Lee Casey appear, Sopranos style, to issue veiled threats to the Supreme Court, warning the justices not put their dirty mitts on the NSA surveillance program, or else.
Here’s some of the evidence:
NSA Spying and the Supreme Court
As I noted in an earlier post, I’m supportive of Bob’s legal argument that the President’s NSA surveillance program is illegal and unconstitutional. (My level of certainty on this: moderate). But for me this doesn’t settle the matter. There’s a separate question: What should the Supreme Court do about it?
For me, this is the hard but all important question. In Baker v. Carr, the Court suggested (in so many words) that justices may want to avoid resolution of a constitutional question if, for example, there is a significant chance another branch might ignore its decision. The reason for this seemingly weak-kneed approach to constitutional adjudication is straightforward. The Supreme Court, a tribunal of nine geriatric lawyers, doesn’t have much muscle. It can’t arrest a recalcitrant President. It relies on the force of its mystique as the oracle of our fundamental law and its soft political power to confer public legitimacy on political branch actions. That’s generally enough to compel the grudging respect and deference of Congress and the President. But in extraordinary times, its possible that a headstrong President convinced of the rightness of his mission, and backed by popular support and a waffling Congress, might simply ignore the Supreme Court. If that happens too often, the Court risks losing its power to command. And a disrespected Court that is repeatedly ignored is far, far worse for the long-term protection of liberty than a Court that occasionally ducks the wrong fight.
So what should the Court do about the NSA surveillance program?
Robert Jackson and NSA Spying Reconsidered
I enjoyed Roger Pilon’s and Bob Levy’s debate on NSA surveillance Friday. I’ll confess I’m in general agreement with Bob. However, I post to note one wrinkle: Bob mentioned Justice Jackson’s opinion in the Steel Seizure Case (Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer) in support of his position against the NSA surveillance program. In the Steel Seizure Case, Jackson’s concurrence set out a tri-partite framework for assessing presidential power, in which he argued that the power of a President acting without congressional authorization is at its lowest ebb. The problem is that no one knows what exactly this means.
In the spring edition of The Green Bag (available here), Jack Goldsmith (my onetime international law professor and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel) discusses a recently discovered draft of Jackson’s (never filed) concurrence in In re Quirin—the case involving the military trial and eventual execution of enemy saboteurs captured on U.S. soil during World War II. The draft opinion sheds some further light on Jackson’s views.
Here’s the basic gist:
[Jackson] ‘began in Quirin with the fixed presumption that the Court has no business reviewing military judgments in time of war, and he never deviated from that position.’ Jackson clearly stated the basis for this presumption in the closing paragraph of his draft opinion in Quirin:
‘[I]n the long run it seems to me that we have no more important duty than to keep clear and separate the lines of responsibility and duty of the judicial and of the executive-military arms of government. Merger of the two is the end of liberty as we in this country have known it. If we are uncompromisingly to discountenance military intervention in civil justice, we would do well to refuse to meddle with military measures . . .’
Jackson’s is a somewhat strange middle position: He felt it was the Court’s duty to declare extra-legal actions undertaken in the service of national security unconstitutional when the Court confronted such acts. But Jackson also seemed to believe that courts should not directly interfere with the carrying out of such unconstitutional “military measures.” In effect, Jackson believed the Court, when confronted with illegal actionj must declare it as such, but should leave the remedy to the political process.
What would Jackson have done in a case reviewing the NSA surveillance program.? It is hard to tell. But to the extent he would have viewed the program as a “military measure,” part of the “necessities and practices” of warfare, he might well have wanted the Court to declare it illegal and then abstain from directly ordering an end to the surveillance program.
D.C. Circuit 1, WaPo 0
Substantive due process cases make normally careful commentators sloppy. As many readers know, the D.C. Circuit ruled on Tuesday that “a terminally ill, mentally competent adult patient’s informed access to potentially life-saving . . . new drugs . . . warrants protection under the Due Process Clause.” Comes the Washington Post editorial board with a slapdash discussion of the case. The Post argues that the decision pulls a new constitutional right “out of thin air”—one that could “create a right to LSD or marijuana.”
Golly. Is that right? Now, there’s no denying the Court’s substantive due process line of cases is controversial. But this decision didn’t pop out of thin air and its not going to legalize marijuana. [Warning: lengthy legal discussion follows.]
A Right to Experimental Drugs? Yes. No. Maybe.
The D.C. Circuit recently ruled that ”a terminally ill, mentally competent adult patient’s informed access to potentially life-saving . . . new drugs determined by the FDA after Phase I trials to be sufficiently safe for expanded human trials warrants protection under the Due Process Clause.” You can read more about it here.
I want to raise a question about the way others are characterizing the case.
Following some of the language of the D.C. Circuit’s opinion, Jonathan Adler and Orin Kerr describe the case as a decision that recognizes a new “right to experimental drugs.” This characterization makes the case sound quite revolutionary. And it raises an interesting problem about how to talk about substantive due process cases. Compare common descriptions of Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health. There, the Supreme Court upheld a state law that, in effect, prohibited withdrawal of life support from a vegetative patient despite her previously expressed wish to die when in such a condition. (The law forced a surrogate to prove the patient’s wishes by heightened evidence.) But the Court also held that patients have a protected liberty interest in “refusing unwanted medical treatment.” Why then did it uphold state law? Because the Court held that the state interests outweighed the liberty interest at issue on the facts of the case.
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