Fruits & Votes is the Web-log of Matthew S. Shugart ("MSS"), Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis.
Perspectives on electoral systems, constitutional design, and policy around the world, based primarily on my research interests.
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Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is worried about “dictatorship.” Her remarks at an event at Georgetown were reported by Nina Totenberg and posted at Raw Story.
In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O’Connor said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms.
…she took aim at former House GOP leader Tom DeLay. She didn’t name him, but she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year…
[...]
It gets worse, she said, noting that death threats against judges are increasing. It doesn’t help, she said, when a high-profile senator suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges and decisions that the senator disagrees with. She didn’t name him, but it was Texas senator John Cornyn who made that statement…
O’Connor observed that there have been a lot of suggestions lately for so-called judicial reforms, recommendations for the massive impeachment of judges, stripping the courts of jurisdiction and cutting judicial budgets to punish offending judges.
And now the punch-line:
Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O’Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strongarm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.
(I can’t say the same about the immediately previous post of his, in which he redirects his aim at a third-party candidate instead of at Bush v. Gore for producing the wrong winner in 2000.)
Al Gore’s speech from January 16 is long, but powerful. Highly recommended. And, no, it is not a coincidence that I read it and am posting it at the very moment when Gore’s opponent in the 2000 case before the Supreme Court is speaking–and on the very day when the vaunted “swing vote” on that Court was replaced with an adherent to the doctrine of executive unilateralism. None of this is a coincidence.
This week, as Alito goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee, it will be seen whether Bush’s boldness in asserting powers of the presidency has complicated the confirmation prospects for his nominee to the Supreme Court. Along with abortion rights, executive power has moved to the forefront in the battle over Alito’s confirmation.
As well it should. I noted a few days ago that Alito has been on record since 1986 as favoring signing statements as a means by which the President could seek to have the courts accept the President’s understanding of a law in future litigation over that law. Courts have tended not to take such statements into account, but if a fan of signing statements were on the Supreme Court, he might seek to raise their prominence.
So, if 1986 seems too long ago, there is this statement from November, 2000, before the Federalist Society, reflecting on his time in the Reagan administration’s Justice Department:
We were strong proponents of the theory of the unitary executive, that all federal executive power is vested by the Constitution in the president. And I thought then, and I still think, that this theory best captures the meaning of the Constitution’s text and structure.
The Times then notes that,
In a sense, the “unitary executive” theory states the obvious. There is only one president. But many of its Reagan-era proponents applied this theory to say independent government agencies were unconstitutional because they were not under the direct control of the president.
In combination, the support for signing statements and opposition to independent regulatory agencies constitute a theory of executive power in which the legislature only makes broad pronouncments of policy, which a single man (or, theoretically, woman) then can reshape. In the absence of independent agencies and with sympathetic justices on the highest court, the President could issue decrees to bureaucrats to implement a law in a way consistent with the Presidential signing statement, and expect the courts to back up the executive’s re-interpretation of the legislative mandate.
In other words, in Alito we have a potential Supreme Court justice who believes that the United States would be better if we had a more Latin American style presidency: One that has much more than a veto, but instead has the constitutional right to implement laws as it sees fit.
Among my research specialties are comparative presidential authority and executive-legislative relations. I have long believed, as a product of my research, that Latin American countries need their congresses to assert more authority over the details of policy-making and create more independent agencies to check executive unilateralism in implementation.
In other words, for all my zeal for reform of certain features of US political institutions–see “the core” list on the left sidebar and “The Mission” above–in terms of executive powers I have long seen the US as the model that other “pure”* presidential systems should emulate.
Apparently, Alito believes the best models of presidentialism are to be found farther south. That is disturbing. The United States Senate–hardly my favorite US institution–needs to force the President to nominate option no. 3 for the critical O’Connor seat on the United States Supreme Court.
*I.e., “pure” in the sense of being unitary at the top: President as head of government as well as head of state, as opposed to “semi-” presidential hybrids, in which the head of government is subject to the confidence of the majority of the lower/sole house of the legislature. The latter is a still-better model, in my view.
Just yesterday I posted a note and some questions on Bush’s recent signing statement, in which he reinterprets a ban on torture as not meaning what it says. Now I ran across a Washington Post article from yesterday that notes that Associate Justice nominee Samuel Alito is a fan of signing statements.
In a memo from February 5, 1986, Alito outlined a strategy for
having the president routinely issue statements about the meaning of statutes when he signs them into law.
Such “interpretive signing statements” would be a significant departure from run-of-the-mill bill signing pronouncements, which are “often little more than a press release,” Alito wrote. The idea was to flag constitutional concerns and get courts to pay as much attention to the president’s take on a law as to “legislative intent.”
“Since the president’s approval is just as important as that of the House or Senate, it seems to follow that the president’s understanding of the bill should be just as important as that of Congress,” Alito wrote.
The quote from Alito’s memo is remarkable. While it is true that the President’s approval is “just as important as that of the House or Senate” inasmuch as all three institutions must consent to the same text of a bill (ignoring bills passed over a veto), it does not follow from that fact that the “president’s understanding of the bill should be just as important.” Congress consists of two chambers, numerous members, and committees. It debates alternate versions, strikes amendments, and replaces provisions. It thus has a lengthy record of why it approved one version and not others that were considered. However, under our constitution, the President is provided a take it or leave it option. If he does not like the bill, he can veto it, and thus re-start the transactional process, leading–maybe–to a new bill emerging from Congress that he’ll like better. But there is no such thing as sign light–taking this provision, blocking that, and reinterpreting others. Many presidential systems give the president such authority, thereby inserting the president more directly into the lawmaking process. But not ours. (I expand this idea a bit in a comment at Lawyers, Guns, and Money.)
The Post article quotes from an article by Phillip J. Cooper in the September, 2005, Presidential Studies Quarterly (now added to my must-read list), noting that the Bush administration
has very effectively expanded the scope and character of the signing statement not only to address specific provisions of legislation that the White House wishes to nullify, but also in an effort to significantly reposition and strengthen the powers of the presidency relative to the Congress.
This adds another item to the list of reasons why Alito should be given a very long and skeptical look by the US Senate in exercise of its constitutional power of advice and consent, two of which I have identified here previously:
He considers Baker v. Carr (on malapportionment) an improper ruling
Meanwhile, in the last two days Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and senior Democrat Robert Byrd of W.Va. have engaged in a verbal skirmish surrounding the possibility that a filibuster by the party with the minority of seats in the body could prompt the party with manufactured majority of seats to “go nuclear” and unilaterally abolish the right of filibuster. Even though there has been no filibuster threat thus far, Frist on Sunday said “the answer is yes” when asked if the Republicans would change the rules to stop a filibuster of Samuel Alito’s confirmation. Byrd today responded on the floor of the Senate: “If he ever tries to exercise that, he’s going to see a real filibuster if I’m living and able to stand on my feet or sit in my seat. If the senator wants a fight, let him try it.”
Interesting that both of these matters would come precisely at the fifth anniversary of Bush v. Gore. These cases all tie together and provide a trifecta of one party using dubious manipulation of law and rules to solidify its grip on the levers of federal power.
In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court handed the presidency to America’s (and probably Florida’s) Second Choice. As my remarks on the Senate filibuster allude to, Republicans are also America’s Second Choice in Senate elections since 2000 (thus the filibuster currently prevents a minority party from acting like a majority party). And in the House, while the Republicans had the plurality (not majority) of votes in 2004, they lost votes compared to 2002, yet gained seats. The net gain is accounted for by the DeLay’s blatant and extraordinary mid-decade partisan gerrymander. (About halfway through an LA Times article there is a good quick summary of that redistricting.)
How will the Court rule on the Delaymander case? The case is similar to one in Pennsylvania in which a 5-4 ruling rejected the notion that an excessively partisan redistricting plan violated equal protection. (The first-linked story, from Bloomberg, has an overview.) Justice Kennedy sided with the majority in that case. Rick Hasen, quoted in both the Bloomberg and Times stories, suggests “One possibility is that Justice Kennedy has come to a firmer conclusion as to how to deal with these cases.”
As for Samuel Alito–who will be on the Court by then if either there is no filibuster or the Republicans nuke it–we know he does not object to legislative malapportionment. Is it a stretch to think he considers partisan gerrymandering to be just fine, too?
I think we know how this is going to turn out.
[UPDATE: Scott Lemieux, at LGM has his usual perceptive analysis, asking whether: (1) The Delaymander is so ourtageous that it will be the case that prompts Kennedy to develop, with the 4 dissenters in the Pennsylvania case, a standard for unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders; or (2) Kennedy is ready to go with Scalia and argue that all partisan gerrymander cases are non-justiciable. Althouse believes the latter: "Perhaps it will use this occasion, however, to set a clear standard for bowing out of these controversies altogether."]
[Scott also notes that Alito's vote, which we can assume, as I did above, to be that the gerrymander is constitutionally permissible, will not affect the balance in the case, given that he replaces O'Connor, who voted with the majority in the Pennsylvania case.]
If by my laws you walk, and my commands you keep, and observe them,
then I will give-forth your rains in their set-time,
so that the earth gives-forth its yield
and the trees of the field give-forth their fruit.
--Vayikra 26: 3-4
F&V time: This blog's date function is so set as to start a new day at approximately local sunset.
(Why, if we have "day" and "night," should a new "day" start in the middle of the night?)
FRUITS: Support your local, organic growers; and, plant vines and fig trees and pomegranates for the generations to come...
VOTES: For democratization and full representation, for environmental sustainability, social justice, and peace, always sincerely...
