Wisconsin’s great progressive senator Robert M. LaFolette grew so frustrated with the conservative-dominated Supreme Court that he called in his 1924 presidential campaign for a constitutional amendment to allow Congress to override judicial decisions and to provide for direct election of federal judges. LaFollette’s proposals went no further than his bid for the White House, but 90 years later frustration with the high court is so great that the call for reining in the courts is heard again.
The modern-day proposals were aired last week [July 22] in a Senate subcommittee hearing convened by the former Supreme Court law clerk, Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican senator running for president. Cruz opened the Senate Judiciary Oversight Subcommittee’s hearing with a 13-minute statement decrying what he called the court’s recent “descent into lawlessness.”
Cruz listed the various proposals: term limits; retention elections; override authority for the states, Congress, or both. Republicans called two conservatives as witnesses: Ed Whelan, the National Review commentator and former Scalia law clerk; and John Eastman, former dean of Chapman Law School. Democrats added the liberal Duke law professor Neil Siegel as a witness.
With that much intellectual firepower, the hearing was disappointing for anyone expecting serious discussion. Instead, the two-hour hearing consisted mostly of second-guessing the court’s recent decisions. Cruz and the conservative witnesses listed the court’s gay marriage and Obamacare decisions; the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, Delaware’s Chris Coons, complained about Citizens United and Shelby County.
Coons tried to tamp down the sense of crisis. “We should reflect long and hard,” he said, before a fundamental change in the constitutional framework for the judiciary. But there was precious little reflection in the hearing.
Two twentieth-century constitutional amendments have fundamentally changed both Congress and the presidency. The Seventeenth gave us direct election of senators; the Twenty-Second limited the president to two terms. The Supreme Court has a larger role today than expected 225 years ago and, thus, perhaps needs some new checks on its power.
Term limits, the least intrusive of the changes under discussion, has the widest support. An ideologically diverse group of academics has been pushing one version of the idea for years, on the theory that regular turnover would benefit the court, the public, and the political process.
At the hearing, Siegel was warm to the idea, Whelan uncertain, and Eastman opposed. Eastman said term limits would just mean one activist judge in place of another. The academics would provide 18-year terms of active service, followed by lifetime tenure as “senior justices.” Some think the change could be accomplished by statute; others say a constitutional amendment would be necessary.
In his book The Case Against the Supreme Court, the liberal academic Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California-Irvine Law School, endorses the idea. He also includes one change not discussed at the hearing: some form of merit selection screening process for nominations to the court. He notes that the president could institute this change on his or her own.
The other two changes discussed at the hearing would deliberately inject politics into the Supreme Court’s place in the constitutional structure. “I support every effort to bring power back to we the people,” Cruz said. But neither he nor his witnesses addressed the potential difficulties.
If a majority of state legislatures or a supermajority of both chambers of Congress actually overruled a Supreme Court decision, the law would be left uncertain. If the marriage decision were overruled, “Question 2” in the case — whether a state must recognize a same-sex marriage from another state — would be unanswered. Nor would the law know the basis for allowing states to ban same-sex marriage.
In any event, advocates of the change likely would be disappointed with the result. The marriage decision would surely withstand an override effort today. In fact, it is quite likely that few if any of the court’s most controversial decisions would have been overruled through such a process: not the good ones, like Brown v. Board of Education, or the bad ones, like Dred Scott. And there is a process for overturning a Supreme Court decision: the Fourteenth Amendment overturned Dred Scott; the Sixteenth Amendment overturned the ruling that barred a federal income tax.
The override authority would politicize Supreme Court decisions more than they already are. Retention elections, adopted in the states to reduce political pressure on judges, would subject the Supreme Court instead to more. Siegel likened the idea to FDR’s proposal to “pack” the court; retention elections, he said, could “unpack” the court one justice at a time. The conservatives seemed open to the idea, but none addressed the effect of exposing justices to hundred-million-dollar election campaigns that would surely be financed by special interest groups of one stripe or another.
The proposals for Supreme Court restructuring have little chance of being adopted. But in post-decision remarks to a judicial conference, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, author of the marriage decision, indicated that the justices appreciate the need to consider public reaction to controversial decisions.
“We draw down on a capital of trust,” Kennedy said, recalling the flag-burning decision. We spend that capital of trust, and we have to rebuild that capital. We have to put new deposits, new substance into this reservoir of trust."
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Glossip's Case a Study in Death Penalty's Flaws
Justice Stephen G. Breyer
wrote a 41-page opinion, complete with five pages of charts and maps, to try to
show that the Supreme Court’s 40-year effort to rationalize the death penalty
in the United States
has failed. But Breyer had no need to go further than the very case at hand.
Richard Glossip, the first
named petitioner in Glossip v. Gross [June 29], was
convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death for the Jan. 7, 1997,
killing of Barry Van Treese, owner of the seedy Oklahoma City motel where
Glossip worked as manager. Glossip did not kill Van Treese and to this day
maintains his innocence. The actual killer was Justin Sneed, the motel’s
teenaged maintenance man, who claimed Glossip pressured and eventually paid him
to kill Van Treese in order to cover up suspected embezzlement.
Nothing in Glossip’s case
singles out him or the killing as especially worthy of the death penalty.
Indeed, the evidence was weak and the circumstances of the killing— even
crediting the prosecution’s theory — were far from the kind of wanton,
heinous murder likely to end with a death sentence anywhere except in a death
penalty-happy jurisdiction.
Sneed, who is now serving a
life sentence for the murder, provided the testimony in two trials that ended
with Glossip’s convictions. In reversing the first conviction, the Oklahoma
Court of Criminal Appeals called the evidence “extremely weak” and ordered a
new trial on grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. Glossip had turned
down a plea bargain with an agreed-on life sentence, but he was convicted and
sentenced to death again. Just as in the first trial, Glossip’s new attorney
failed to impeach Sneed by highlighting his evasiveness when first interrogated
by police. In any event, the conviction and sentence were upheld on appeal and
in federal habeas corpus proceedings.
Glossip’s guilt or
innocence was not at issue before the Supreme Court. The court’s 5-4 ruling
cleared the way for Oklahoma
and other states to use the sedative midazolam as the first drug in lethal
injections despite some evidence that it fails to render an inmate unconscious
for the rest of the procedure. Breyer joined the main dissent in the case,
written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, but wrote separately for himself and Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg in calling for a complete re-examination of the
constitutionality of capital punishment.
Breyer listed four factors
to show that the hopeful assumptions the court made in 1976 in reinstating
capital punishment have not been realized. The death penalty has been shown to
be unreliable: too many exonerations and, in Breyer’s view, strong evidence
that one or more innocent men have been put to death. Death penalties have also
been imposed arbitrarily, influenced by such supposedly extraneous factors as
race and geography. The maps he attached showed the small number of counties in
the United States
that account for the vast majority of death sentences.
Oklahoma County, which
includes Oklahoma City, ranks third in the number of execution-resulting
convictions since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Two Texas counties rank first and second: Harris County
(Houston) and Dallas County
(Dallas-Fort Worth).
Credit for Oklahoma
County's ranking goes to the late Robert (“Cowboy Bob”) Macy, who won 54 death sentences in 21
years as the county’s elected district attorney. Macy, who retired in 2001 and
died in 2011, said publicly that the risk of executing an innocent person was worth taking in the interest of public safety. After he left office, the
Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a 2002 decision that Macy’s
“persistent misconduct” had “harmed the reputation of Oklahoma's criminal justice system.”
As a third factor, Breyer
pointed to the long delay between sentences and actual executions — an
average of 18 years. Breyer argued the delays are inevitable in a due process
system but at the same time undermine the supposed rationales for the death
penalty: retribution or deterrence. And as a fourth factor Breyer noticed the
declining public support for capital punishment, as indicated by among other
things the declining number of death sentences being returned by juries.
The Glossip case was
thoroughly dissected in a long article published by The
Intercept, the leftist online publication headed by Glenn Greenwald.
The article
by Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith is advocacy journalism to be sure. Segura, a onetime senior editor at the leftist magazine
The Nation, is a member of the National Coalition to Abolish
the Death Penalty. Smith is a writer at the Austin
Chronicle, independent alternative newsweekly.
The article includes no
interviews with prosecutors or members of either of the two juries that
convicted Glossip. Nor is there any reporting from those trials to show how the
prosecution rebutted Glossip’s version of events. Nor do they note that the
Tenth Circuit called the retrial “fundamentally fair” in its decision
in 2013 denying habeas corpus. Still, Segura
and Smith make a strong showing that the conviction is “flimsy,” based on
little else than the testimony of “a confessed murderer with a very good
incentive to lie.”
Reporter Graham Lee Brewer,
who covers criminal justice for The Daily Oklahoman, has
interviewed Glossip many times and questions Glossip’s claims of innocence. But
if Glossip is put to death on Sept. 16 as scheduled — with the actual
killer sill alive — the case will be one more example of a system that
defies best efforts to be fair and just or even simply to make sense.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
For Court's Conservatives, Worst Term Ever
Chief Justice John G. Roberts had just finished reading his biting dissent in the same-sex marriage case when he took up the more mundane duty of announcing that Justice Antonin Scalia had the opinion in the next case: Johnson v. United States. “Don’t go away,” Scalia quipped.
Scalia’s opinion would have gotten a fair share of attention that day [June 26] but for the marriage decision. With the votes of six justices, the court struck down a provision of federal law that imposed an additional 15-year to life prison term on a federal offender with at least three prior convictions for “violent” felonies.
The Armed Career Criminal Act, enacted in 1984, applies to some specific priors and in the so-called “residual clause” also includes crimes with “conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.” Scalia had twice written dissents, in 2007 and 2011, urging that the clause be struck down as unconstitutionally vague.
Scalia appeared to be as cheerful as a canary-eating-cat as he announced the decision that vindicated his dissents of still recent memory. By contrast, the 79-year-old justice was at his sarcastic worst the day before when he dissented from the decision written by Roberts that saved the Affordable Care Act.
In fact, it was a bad term overall for Scalia: apparently his worst ever. He dissented in 23 cases, the highest number at least since the 1992-93 term when I began counting dissenting votes for my annual series Supreme Court Yearbook.
Scalia was not alone. The court’s three other reliable conservatives also had personal-worst years. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented in 29 cases: not only his highest number, but also the highest figure for any justice since OT 1992. Justice John Paul Stevens held the previous record: 28 dissents in two separate terms, 1999-2000 and 2008-09.
The Supreme Court Yearbook compilation does not reach back to Scalia’s first six terms or Thomas’s first. But the court’s conservatives generally held sway during those years, so their dissenting numbers were unlikely to have been on the high side.
Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. also recorded personal highs for dissenting votes during OT 2014. Roberts cast 16 dissenting votes, surpassing his previous high of 14 dissents in OT 2008. Alito cast 21 dissenting votes; he had previously dissented in 16 cases in the 2012-2013 term.
Meanwhile, three of the court’s liberal justices recorded personal bests. Ruth Bader Ginsburg cast 10 dissenting votes, the lowest number in her 23 terms. With six dissents, Stephen G. Breyer had the lowest number in his 22 terms; he was also the lowest of any of the justices for the term — the second time he has had that distinction. With eight dissents, Sonia Sotomayor had the lowest number for her six terms; Kagan, with 11 dissents, had the second lowest number for her five terms.
The historical comparisons fortify the general characterization of the court as having tilted quite unusually to the left in OT 2014. The liberal justices, often bolstered by votes from the bloc-shifting Anthony M. Kennedy, prevailed not only in the marriage and Obamacare cases but also in most of the other important, divided decisions.
Scalia’s late-term victory in Johnson, however, shows the conservatives may be down but not out. Indeed, the conservatives won two of the three decisions on the term’s final day, and they appeared to be the moving force the next day in a bit of aggressive agenda-setting for the coming term.
The justices accepted for next term a significant challenge to public employee unions brought by dissident California teachers, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. This will be the court’s third case in five years challenging so-called agency shop rules that require public employees to pay fees to unions for the costs of collective bargaining even if they are not members. The plaintiffs claim the fees violate their freedom of speech and association; the unions say eliminating the fees would allow the dissidents to be free-riders — getting union-provided representation and benefits without paying for them.
The court struck down an agency shop provision in a decision last year affecting Illinois home health care workers, Harris v. Quinn (2014). In his majority opinion, Alito criticized but stopped short of overruling the precedent that allows agency shop provisions: Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977). The new case is viewed by public employee unions as the shoe set to fall.
The court had already set up a new test of racial preferences in university admissions by agreeing to hear Fisher v. University of Texas. This is the sequel to its earlier ruling in the same case in 2013 instructing the federal appeals court to take a second look at UT’s policies.
The conservative justices were also the likely votes for hearing a politically significant redistricting case, Evenwel v. Abbott, also from Texas. The plaintiffs want to read the one-person, one-vote rule to count the voting population instead of total population in equalizing legislative districts. A ruling to that effect could shift political power away from areas with significant non-citizen populations or low voter registration.
With those and other cases already teed up, conservatives are hoping for the best and liberals bracing for the worst. “Next term is going to be at least as important as this term, if not more,” remarked Steven Vladeck, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.
Scalia’s opinion would have gotten a fair share of attention that day [June 26] but for the marriage decision. With the votes of six justices, the court struck down a provision of federal law that imposed an additional 15-year to life prison term on a federal offender with at least three prior convictions for “violent” felonies.
The Armed Career Criminal Act, enacted in 1984, applies to some specific priors and in the so-called “residual clause” also includes crimes with “conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.” Scalia had twice written dissents, in 2007 and 2011, urging that the clause be struck down as unconstitutionally vague.
Scalia appeared to be as cheerful as a canary-eating-cat as he announced the decision that vindicated his dissents of still recent memory. By contrast, the 79-year-old justice was at his sarcastic worst the day before when he dissented from the decision written by Roberts that saved the Affordable Care Act.
In fact, it was a bad term overall for Scalia: apparently his worst ever. He dissented in 23 cases, the highest number at least since the 1992-93 term when I began counting dissenting votes for my annual series Supreme Court Yearbook.
Scalia was not alone. The court’s three other reliable conservatives also had personal-worst years. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented in 29 cases: not only his highest number, but also the highest figure for any justice since OT 1992. Justice John Paul Stevens held the previous record: 28 dissents in two separate terms, 1999-2000 and 2008-09.
The Supreme Court Yearbook compilation does not reach back to Scalia’s first six terms or Thomas’s first. But the court’s conservatives generally held sway during those years, so their dissenting numbers were unlikely to have been on the high side.
Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. also recorded personal highs for dissenting votes during OT 2014. Roberts cast 16 dissenting votes, surpassing his previous high of 14 dissents in OT 2008. Alito cast 21 dissenting votes; he had previously dissented in 16 cases in the 2012-2013 term.
Meanwhile, three of the court’s liberal justices recorded personal bests. Ruth Bader Ginsburg cast 10 dissenting votes, the lowest number in her 23 terms. With six dissents, Stephen G. Breyer had the lowest number in his 22 terms; he was also the lowest of any of the justices for the term — the second time he has had that distinction. With eight dissents, Sonia Sotomayor had the lowest number for her six terms; Kagan, with 11 dissents, had the second lowest number for her five terms.
The historical comparisons fortify the general characterization of the court as having tilted quite unusually to the left in OT 2014. The liberal justices, often bolstered by votes from the bloc-shifting Anthony M. Kennedy, prevailed not only in the marriage and Obamacare cases but also in most of the other important, divided decisions.
Scalia’s late-term victory in Johnson, however, shows the conservatives may be down but not out. Indeed, the conservatives won two of the three decisions on the term’s final day, and they appeared to be the moving force the next day in a bit of aggressive agenda-setting for the coming term.
The justices accepted for next term a significant challenge to public employee unions brought by dissident California teachers, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. This will be the court’s third case in five years challenging so-called agency shop rules that require public employees to pay fees to unions for the costs of collective bargaining even if they are not members. The plaintiffs claim the fees violate their freedom of speech and association; the unions say eliminating the fees would allow the dissidents to be free-riders — getting union-provided representation and benefits without paying for them.
The court struck down an agency shop provision in a decision last year affecting Illinois home health care workers, Harris v. Quinn (2014). In his majority opinion, Alito criticized but stopped short of overruling the precedent that allows agency shop provisions: Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977). The new case is viewed by public employee unions as the shoe set to fall.
The court had already set up a new test of racial preferences in university admissions by agreeing to hear Fisher v. University of Texas. This is the sequel to its earlier ruling in the same case in 2013 instructing the federal appeals court to take a second look at UT’s policies.
The conservative justices were also the likely votes for hearing a politically significant redistricting case, Evenwel v. Abbott, also from Texas. The plaintiffs want to read the one-person, one-vote rule to count the voting population instead of total population in equalizing legislative districts. A ruling to that effect could shift political power away from areas with significant non-citizen populations or low voter registration.
With those and other cases already teed up, conservatives are hoping for the best and liberals bracing for the worst. “Next term is going to be at least as important as this term, if not more,” remarked Steven Vladeck, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Breyer, Ginsburg Surprise on Death Penalty
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Oklahoma lethal injection case on the final day of the term [June 29] went pretty much as expected. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. spoke for the conservative majority in rejecting the challenge. In oral argument, Alito had declared that the challenges about the specific drugs used in lethal injections amounted to “guerrilla warfare” by death penalty opponents in the face of legislative and judicial approval of capital punishment.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke for the four liberal justices in dissent. Sotomayor had bluntly told the state’s lawyer that she did not believe what he was saying. And she made clear her view that inmates would suffer excruciating pain during the executions because the drug Oklahoma planned to use to render them unconscious would not actually work.
However predictable, the reading of the two opinions in Glossip v. Gross was high courtroom drama. Alito denounced in advance what he called Sotomayor’s “outlandish rhetoric.” Sotomayor followed by likening Oklahoma’s flawed lethal injections to being burned alive at the stake.
But there was more to come: a genuine surprise from the court’s senior liberal justices, Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In a rare reading from the bench of a second dissenting opinion, Breyer announced that he and Ginsburg were ready to find the death penalty unconstitutional altogether.
Breyer’s 41-page dissent, longest of the five opinions in the case, lays out point by point a solid argument against capital punishment as practiced for the last four decades. The Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972 as then administered. Four years later, the court allowed capital punishment to resume but under guidelines intended to cure the flaws from the past. “Forty years of experience with those procedures and protections,” Breyer declared from the bench, “shows that they do not work.”
Breyer speaks and writes from experience. During their long tenures, Supreme Court justices see more death penalty cases up close than any other individual public official: prosecutors, governors, or state or federal court judges. Year after year, the last-minute applications for stays of execution keep coming. And year after year the cases evidence a system that fails to deliver what the Supreme Court promises above its front entrance: equal justice for all.
For the first of four points, Breyer cited the proven unreliability of the death penalty system. “We now have persuasive evidence,” Breyer declared, “that innocent individuals have been executed and that more than 100 individuals convicted of capital crimes and sentenced to death have later been fully exonerated.” In addition, “the rate of procedural error in capital trials is alarming, well over 60 percent,” he said.
Justice Antonin Scalia, perhaps the most outspoken defender of capital punishment on the court, has insisted in the past that there is no evidence of an innocent person having been put to death in the United States. He chose not to debate the point in his nine-page reply to Breyer. Instead, he argued with hypertechnical textualism that a wrongful conviction does not implicate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments.
After unreliability, Breyer turned to his second point: arbitrariness. Despite best efforts, the death penalty system has failed to ensure that the ultimate punishment is reserved for only the most egregious of crimes. Numerous studies have shown that race, gender, and geography affect imposition of the death penalty more than “comparative egregiousness.” Breyer noted other, even more troubling factors: the limited resources for defense counsel and political pressure on judges, especially those up for re-election.
For a third point, Breyer pointed to the long delays between sentences and actual executions: an average of 18 years for executions carried out in 2014. The delays are cruel punishment of themselves, Breyer said, but they also undermine the legitimate justifications for the death penalty: deterrence or retribution. Long after the murder, an execution serves either purpose tenuously at most.
Scalia responded by blaming the delays on death penalty opponents and judges like Breyer sympathetic to death row inmates’ dubious claims. As rebuttal, Breyer noted that speeding up capital cases would risk increasing the error rate. Many of the documented exonerations came years or even decades later. “Administration of the death penalty can take place swiftly but unreliably or it can take place with long delays but without significant justifying purposes,” Breyer said. “We cannot have it both ways.”
As his final point, Breyer saw a waning of public support for executions. Among the 31 death penalty states, only seven carried out executions in 2014. In Texas, the number of new death sentences has fallen from 48 a decade and a half ago to only nine last year. And a detailed map shows that even in death penalty states death sentences are concentrated in a small number of counties: for example, Harris County (Houston) in Texas and Shelby County (Memphis) in my home state, Tennessee.
“We are a court, not a legislature,” Breyer concedes. But these issues, he says, are judicial matters that implicate the Eighth Amendment. The time has come, he and Ginsburg now say, for the Supreme Court to consider the question anew. Full briefing and argument would force the justices to confront the issues with what is expected of them: reasoned judgment, not political rhetoric.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke for the four liberal justices in dissent. Sotomayor had bluntly told the state’s lawyer that she did not believe what he was saying. And she made clear her view that inmates would suffer excruciating pain during the executions because the drug Oklahoma planned to use to render them unconscious would not actually work.
However predictable, the reading of the two opinions in Glossip v. Gross was high courtroom drama. Alito denounced in advance what he called Sotomayor’s “outlandish rhetoric.” Sotomayor followed by likening Oklahoma’s flawed lethal injections to being burned alive at the stake.
But there was more to come: a genuine surprise from the court’s senior liberal justices, Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In a rare reading from the bench of a second dissenting opinion, Breyer announced that he and Ginsburg were ready to find the death penalty unconstitutional altogether.
Breyer’s 41-page dissent, longest of the five opinions in the case, lays out point by point a solid argument against capital punishment as practiced for the last four decades. The Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972 as then administered. Four years later, the court allowed capital punishment to resume but under guidelines intended to cure the flaws from the past. “Forty years of experience with those procedures and protections,” Breyer declared from the bench, “shows that they do not work.”
Breyer speaks and writes from experience. During their long tenures, Supreme Court justices see more death penalty cases up close than any other individual public official: prosecutors, governors, or state or federal court judges. Year after year, the last-minute applications for stays of execution keep coming. And year after year the cases evidence a system that fails to deliver what the Supreme Court promises above its front entrance: equal justice for all.
For the first of four points, Breyer cited the proven unreliability of the death penalty system. “We now have persuasive evidence,” Breyer declared, “that innocent individuals have been executed and that more than 100 individuals convicted of capital crimes and sentenced to death have later been fully exonerated.” In addition, “the rate of procedural error in capital trials is alarming, well over 60 percent,” he said.
Justice Antonin Scalia, perhaps the most outspoken defender of capital punishment on the court, has insisted in the past that there is no evidence of an innocent person having been put to death in the United States. He chose not to debate the point in his nine-page reply to Breyer. Instead, he argued with hypertechnical textualism that a wrongful conviction does not implicate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments.
After unreliability, Breyer turned to his second point: arbitrariness. Despite best efforts, the death penalty system has failed to ensure that the ultimate punishment is reserved for only the most egregious of crimes. Numerous studies have shown that race, gender, and geography affect imposition of the death penalty more than “comparative egregiousness.” Breyer noted other, even more troubling factors: the limited resources for defense counsel and political pressure on judges, especially those up for re-election.
For a third point, Breyer pointed to the long delays between sentences and actual executions: an average of 18 years for executions carried out in 2014. The delays are cruel punishment of themselves, Breyer said, but they also undermine the legitimate justifications for the death penalty: deterrence or retribution. Long after the murder, an execution serves either purpose tenuously at most.
Scalia responded by blaming the delays on death penalty opponents and judges like Breyer sympathetic to death row inmates’ dubious claims. As rebuttal, Breyer noted that speeding up capital cases would risk increasing the error rate. Many of the documented exonerations came years or even decades later. “Administration of the death penalty can take place swiftly but unreliably or it can take place with long delays but without significant justifying purposes,” Breyer said. “We cannot have it both ways.”
As his final point, Breyer saw a waning of public support for executions. Among the 31 death penalty states, only seven carried out executions in 2014. In Texas, the number of new death sentences has fallen from 48 a decade and a half ago to only nine last year. And a detailed map shows that even in death penalty states death sentences are concentrated in a small number of counties: for example, Harris County (Houston) in Texas and Shelby County (Memphis) in my home state, Tennessee.
“We are a court, not a legislature,” Breyer concedes. But these issues, he says, are judicial matters that implicate the Eighth Amendment. The time has come, he and Ginsburg now say, for the Supreme Court to consider the question anew. Full briefing and argument would force the justices to confront the issues with what is expected of them: reasoned judgment, not political rhetoric.
Monday, June 29, 2015
Conservatives Push Back Against Court's Liberal Tilt
The Supreme Court ended its most liberal term since 1969 with a determined pushback by the court’s conservatives in two of three final decisions, but liberals still counted victories in most of the term’s major rulings.
The Roberts Court conservatives, including the bloc-shifting justice Anthony M. Kennedy, coalesced on the term’s final decision day [June 29] to reject a challenge to Oklahoma’s protocol for lethal injections (Glossip v. Gross) and to require the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reconsider rules for fossil-fueled power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants (Michigan v. EPA).
In the third decision, however, Kennedy gave the liberal bloc the critical fifth vote to uphold Arizona’s anti-gerrymandering initiative creating an independent, politically balanced commission for congressional redistricting (Arizona Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission).
The court issued its final decisions just one week after The New York Times had published a data-based analysis describing the 2014-2015 term as the most liberal of any since 1969. In an online updating of the compilation after Monday’s decisions, the Times counted 56 percent of the term’s decisions as liberal.
That was the highest percentage of liberal rulings since Chief Justice Earl Warren’s retirement in 1969, according to the Times, based on a methodology used by the Supreme Court Database, a private research service funded in part by the National Science Foundation. The Times said that the database showed liberals often prevailed in 70 percent or more of the decisions during the Warren Court's 16-year era.
Other number crunchers came up with higher batting averages for the liberals. Tom Goldstein, founder and publisher of SCOTUSblog, wrote in an end-of-term post that out of 26 cases that were "close" and "ideological," liberals prevailed in 19 or 73 percent. This writer, preparing the annual title Supreme Court Yearbook, counts liberal wins in eight of the top 10 cases and in eight out of 11 other “major” cases — or 76 percent in all.
The liberal tilt is seen vividly in the term’s 21 rulings decided by 5-4 votes. Kennedy and the four liberals — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — formed the majority in 10 of the cases; Chief Justice John G. Roberts joined with the four liberals in one other. Kennedy and the four conservatives formed the majority in only five. Out of five others, three conservatives were dissenters in three; two conservatives and two liberals dissented in each of the other two.
The liberal tilt is also confirmed by counting dissenting votes. Breyer ended the term with the fewest number of dissenting votes — six — for the first time under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and perhaps the first time ever. Kennedy, who has been the least frequent dissenter for most of the Roberts Court years, ended with eight dissenting votes. Besides Breyer, the other three liberal justices each had fewer dissents — Sotomayor (8), Ginsburg (10), Kagan (11) — than the four conservatives: Roberts (16), Alito (22), Scalia (23), Thomas (25).
Roberts ended the term with the highest number of dissents in any of his 10 terms, surpassing his previous high of 14 in the 2008-2009 term. Roberts had the lowest number of dissents in three of the previous nine terms.
Liberals prevailed in the term’s two biggest headline-grabbing decisions: the ruling to guarantee marriage rights to same-sex couples (Obergefell v. Hodges, 5-4) and the decision to uphold Obamacare subsidies to customers of newly created health insurance marketplaces nationwide (King v. Burwell, 6-3).
Among other decisions in the Supreme Court Yearbook “Top Ten,” liberals upheld broad application of the federal Fair Housing Act (Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, 5-4) and judicial ethics rules barring judges from direct solicitation of campaign contributions (Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar, 5-4). Roberts was the author and the fifth vote in the judicial ethics decision.
The court sided with the president over Congress in striking down a law that would have allowed a U.S. citizen born in Jerusalem to list “Israel” as his or her birthplace (Zivotofsky v. Kerry). Three conservative justices dissented: Roberts, Scalia, and Alito; Thomas concurred in part and dissented in part. In less divided cases, the court somewhat limited the federal threat statute in the closely watched Facebook case (Elonis v. United States, 7-2). And it strengthened religious freedom rights of employees and job applicants (EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch, Inc., 8-1).
Against those eight liberal wins, including Monday’s Arizona redistricting case, conservatives counted victories in only two of Supreme Court Yearbook’s “Top Ten”: the decisions Monday in the lethal injection and EPA mercury regulation cases. Among other “major” cases, the conservative bloc plus Kennedy prevailed in only one other 5-4 decision: the ruling to strike down on property rights grounds a U.S. Department of Agriculture marketing program for raisin producers (Horne v. U.S. Department of Agriculture).
The percentage of 5-4 decisions — 21 of 66 or 31.8 percent — was the highest figure since the 2006-2007 term, when the court hit a historic high with 24 of 68 one-vote decisions or 35 percent. One methodological note: Supreme Court Yearbook counts two cases with partial dissents as 5-4 decisions, although SCOTUSblog counts those rulings as 6-3 (Kansas v. Nebraska, a water rights dispute, and Zivotofsky).
The Roberts Court conservatives, including the bloc-shifting justice Anthony M. Kennedy, coalesced on the term’s final decision day [June 29] to reject a challenge to Oklahoma’s protocol for lethal injections (Glossip v. Gross) and to require the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reconsider rules for fossil-fueled power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants (Michigan v. EPA).
In the third decision, however, Kennedy gave the liberal bloc the critical fifth vote to uphold Arizona’s anti-gerrymandering initiative creating an independent, politically balanced commission for congressional redistricting (Arizona Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission).
The court issued its final decisions just one week after The New York Times had published a data-based analysis describing the 2014-2015 term as the most liberal of any since 1969. In an online updating of the compilation after Monday’s decisions, the Times counted 56 percent of the term’s decisions as liberal.
That was the highest percentage of liberal rulings since Chief Justice Earl Warren’s retirement in 1969, according to the Times, based on a methodology used by the Supreme Court Database, a private research service funded in part by the National Science Foundation. The Times said that the database showed liberals often prevailed in 70 percent or more of the decisions during the Warren Court's 16-year era.
Other number crunchers came up with higher batting averages for the liberals. Tom Goldstein, founder and publisher of SCOTUSblog, wrote in an end-of-term post that out of 26 cases that were "close" and "ideological," liberals prevailed in 19 or 73 percent. This writer, preparing the annual title Supreme Court Yearbook, counts liberal wins in eight of the top 10 cases and in eight out of 11 other “major” cases — or 76 percent in all.
The liberal tilt is seen vividly in the term’s 21 rulings decided by 5-4 votes. Kennedy and the four liberals — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — formed the majority in 10 of the cases; Chief Justice John G. Roberts joined with the four liberals in one other. Kennedy and the four conservatives formed the majority in only five. Out of five others, three conservatives were dissenters in three; two conservatives and two liberals dissented in each of the other two.
The liberal tilt is also confirmed by counting dissenting votes. Breyer ended the term with the fewest number of dissenting votes — six — for the first time under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and perhaps the first time ever. Kennedy, who has been the least frequent dissenter for most of the Roberts Court years, ended with eight dissenting votes. Besides Breyer, the other three liberal justices each had fewer dissents — Sotomayor (8), Ginsburg (10), Kagan (11) — than the four conservatives: Roberts (16), Alito (22), Scalia (23), Thomas (25).
Roberts ended the term with the highest number of dissents in any of his 10 terms, surpassing his previous high of 14 in the 2008-2009 term. Roberts had the lowest number of dissents in three of the previous nine terms.
Liberals prevailed in the term’s two biggest headline-grabbing decisions: the ruling to guarantee marriage rights to same-sex couples (Obergefell v. Hodges, 5-4) and the decision to uphold Obamacare subsidies to customers of newly created health insurance marketplaces nationwide (King v. Burwell, 6-3).
Among other decisions in the Supreme Court Yearbook “Top Ten,” liberals upheld broad application of the federal Fair Housing Act (Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, 5-4) and judicial ethics rules barring judges from direct solicitation of campaign contributions (Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar, 5-4). Roberts was the author and the fifth vote in the judicial ethics decision.
The court sided with the president over Congress in striking down a law that would have allowed a U.S. citizen born in Jerusalem to list “Israel” as his or her birthplace (Zivotofsky v. Kerry). Three conservative justices dissented: Roberts, Scalia, and Alito; Thomas concurred in part and dissented in part. In less divided cases, the court somewhat limited the federal threat statute in the closely watched Facebook case (Elonis v. United States, 7-2). And it strengthened religious freedom rights of employees and job applicants (EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch, Inc., 8-1).
Against those eight liberal wins, including Monday’s Arizona redistricting case, conservatives counted victories in only two of Supreme Court Yearbook’s “Top Ten”: the decisions Monday in the lethal injection and EPA mercury regulation cases. Among other “major” cases, the conservative bloc plus Kennedy prevailed in only one other 5-4 decision: the ruling to strike down on property rights grounds a U.S. Department of Agriculture marketing program for raisin producers (Horne v. U.S. Department of Agriculture).
The percentage of 5-4 decisions — 21 of 66 or 31.8 percent — was the highest figure since the 2006-2007 term, when the court hit a historic high with 24 of 68 one-vote decisions or 35 percent. One methodological note: Supreme Court Yearbook counts two cases with partial dissents as 5-4 decisions, although SCOTUSblog counts those rulings as 6-3 (Kansas v. Nebraska, a water rights dispute, and Zivotofsky).
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Celebrating a Fundamental Right for All
The Supreme Court’s decision extending marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples nationwide showcases Justice Anthony M. Kennedy simultaneously at his best and his worst. Kennedy’s 28-page opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges [June 26] is more lyrical than legal: heavy with florid celebration of the deeper meaning of marriage, somewhat light on legal citations.
Naturally, the dissenters in the 5-4 decision seized on the weak spots. In the main dissent, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. complained of Kennedy’s “aggressive application” of substantive due process with “not a single sentence” to support the equal protection prong of the ruling. Justice Antonin Scalia acidly observed that Kennedy’s opinion was “couched in a style as pretentious as its content is egotistic.”
For his part, Justice Clarence Thomas skewered Kennedy’s obsessive focus on individual dignity: “The Constitution contains no ‘dignity’ clause,” he wrote. And, like the others, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. saw the ruling as nothing more than the personal preferences of their colleagues: “five lawyers,” as Roberts called them. The majority was claiming the power to confer the right to marriage, Alito concluded, “simply because they believe it is fundamental.”
Kennedy resisted the temptation to respond in kind, with no explicit reference to his dissenting colleagues. He focused instead on the positive. The right to marriage is fundamental, he explained, not just because the Supreme Court has said so — in Loving v. Virginia (1967) and other cases — but because it is. The right to marry the person of one’s choice, Kennedy reasons, “is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy.” Marriage, he says, allows the individuals together to find other freedoms: “expression, intimacy, spirituality.”
As the second of four premises, Kennedy says that marriage supports a “two-person union” unlike any other. It offers “the hope of companionship, understanding, and assurance” while also responding to “the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there.” And, third and fourth, marriage provides safeguards to children and families and serves as “a keystone of social order.”
In the dozens of lower court decisions over the past two years, judges went to great lengths to shoot down the arguments that same-sex marriage opponents offered to defend the state bans: fewer marriages, more out-of-wedlock children, and so forth. Kennedy brushed those fears off with a single paragraph. The predictions of harmful outcomes for opposite-sex marriages were “counterintuitive,” he wrote. And opponents “had not shown a foundation” for their warnings.
On the opposite side, the dissenting justices equally failed to prove that the dire outcomes were likely. The issue brings to mind the clash during oral arguments between Scalia and Justice Elena Kagan over which side had the burden of proof in the cases. Scalia said the plaintiffs had to prove the bans unjustified, while Kagan countered that the states had to show justifications for excluding gays and lesbians. Kennedy’s opinion shows that Kagan won that point.
For his response, Roberts depicted Kennedy’s opinion as an exercise in anti-democratic judicial supremacy, a revival of the discredited Lochner era of striking down laws passed by the people’s representatives. Roberts’ response would ring more true if he had not helped put together the 5-4 majorities that plowed new ground by overriding legislative enactments that limited corporations’ spending in political campaigns and that banned possession of handguns.
In any event, marriage advocates long ago came up with the apt response to the political process argument. “We didn’t get to vote on your marriage,” they said, waggishly. “Why do you get to vote on ours?” Margaret Marshall, the former Massachusetts chief justice who wrote the state’s landmark marriage equality ruling in 2003, commented more seriously that Roberts seemed to have forgotten that Americans live in a constitutional, not a parliamentary, democracy.
Like the other three conservatives, Roberts warned of dire consequences from the ruling not so much for marriage, but for the body politic and, ironically, for same-sex couples and their advocates. “Closing debate tends to close minds,” he wrote. “People denied a voice are less likely to accept the ruling of a court.” Alito worried even more open-endedly. “[A]ll Americans . . . should worry about what the majority’s claim of power portends,” he wrote.
Social conservatives and some, but by no means all, of the Republican politicians who responded to the ruling echoed those sentiments. But with polls now showing majority support for same-sex marriage rights, President Obama seemed to capture popular sentiment more accurately by embracing the ruling unqualifiedly — and lighting up the White House in rainbow colors in the evening.
By day’s end, same-sex couples apparently were marrying in every state but Mississippi. “It would misunderstand these men and women to say that they disrespect the idea of marriage,” Kennedy wrote. “Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions.”
To his partial credit, Roberts closed by urging same-sex couples to go ahead and celebrate the victory — but not the Constitution. “It had nothing to do with it,” he said. Kennedy disagreed. Gays and lesbians, he said “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
Naturally, the dissenters in the 5-4 decision seized on the weak spots. In the main dissent, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. complained of Kennedy’s “aggressive application” of substantive due process with “not a single sentence” to support the equal protection prong of the ruling. Justice Antonin Scalia acidly observed that Kennedy’s opinion was “couched in a style as pretentious as its content is egotistic.”
For his part, Justice Clarence Thomas skewered Kennedy’s obsessive focus on individual dignity: “The Constitution contains no ‘dignity’ clause,” he wrote. And, like the others, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. saw the ruling as nothing more than the personal preferences of their colleagues: “five lawyers,” as Roberts called them. The majority was claiming the power to confer the right to marriage, Alito concluded, “simply because they believe it is fundamental.”
Kennedy resisted the temptation to respond in kind, with no explicit reference to his dissenting colleagues. He focused instead on the positive. The right to marriage is fundamental, he explained, not just because the Supreme Court has said so — in Loving v. Virginia (1967) and other cases — but because it is. The right to marry the person of one’s choice, Kennedy reasons, “is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy.” Marriage, he says, allows the individuals together to find other freedoms: “expression, intimacy, spirituality.”
As the second of four premises, Kennedy says that marriage supports a “two-person union” unlike any other. It offers “the hope of companionship, understanding, and assurance” while also responding to “the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there.” And, third and fourth, marriage provides safeguards to children and families and serves as “a keystone of social order.”
In the dozens of lower court decisions over the past two years, judges went to great lengths to shoot down the arguments that same-sex marriage opponents offered to defend the state bans: fewer marriages, more out-of-wedlock children, and so forth. Kennedy brushed those fears off with a single paragraph. The predictions of harmful outcomes for opposite-sex marriages were “counterintuitive,” he wrote. And opponents “had not shown a foundation” for their warnings.
On the opposite side, the dissenting justices equally failed to prove that the dire outcomes were likely. The issue brings to mind the clash during oral arguments between Scalia and Justice Elena Kagan over which side had the burden of proof in the cases. Scalia said the plaintiffs had to prove the bans unjustified, while Kagan countered that the states had to show justifications for excluding gays and lesbians. Kennedy’s opinion shows that Kagan won that point.
For his response, Roberts depicted Kennedy’s opinion as an exercise in anti-democratic judicial supremacy, a revival of the discredited Lochner era of striking down laws passed by the people’s representatives. Roberts’ response would ring more true if he had not helped put together the 5-4 majorities that plowed new ground by overriding legislative enactments that limited corporations’ spending in political campaigns and that banned possession of handguns.
In any event, marriage advocates long ago came up with the apt response to the political process argument. “We didn’t get to vote on your marriage,” they said, waggishly. “Why do you get to vote on ours?” Margaret Marshall, the former Massachusetts chief justice who wrote the state’s landmark marriage equality ruling in 2003, commented more seriously that Roberts seemed to have forgotten that Americans live in a constitutional, not a parliamentary, democracy.
Like the other three conservatives, Roberts warned of dire consequences from the ruling not so much for marriage, but for the body politic and, ironically, for same-sex couples and their advocates. “Closing debate tends to close minds,” he wrote. “People denied a voice are less likely to accept the ruling of a court.” Alito worried even more open-endedly. “[A]ll Americans . . . should worry about what the majority’s claim of power portends,” he wrote.
Social conservatives and some, but by no means all, of the Republican politicians who responded to the ruling echoed those sentiments. But with polls now showing majority support for same-sex marriage rights, President Obama seemed to capture popular sentiment more accurately by embracing the ruling unqualifiedly — and lighting up the White House in rainbow colors in the evening.
By day’s end, same-sex couples apparently were marrying in every state but Mississippi. “It would misunderstand these men and women to say that they disrespect the idea of marriage,” Kennedy wrote. “Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions.”
To his partial credit, Roberts closed by urging same-sex couples to go ahead and celebrate the victory — but not the Constitution. “It had nothing to do with it,” he said. Kennedy disagreed. Gays and lesbians, he said “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Verrilli Takes Victory Lap in Obamacare, Housing Cases
President Obama was quick to claim victory after the Supreme Court’s decision today [June 25] allowing tax credits to customers of Obamacare health insurance exchanges nationwide. “This was a good day for America,” Obama declared at a news conference arranged within the hour after the court issued its ruling.
Obama had good reason to feel vindicated and relieved after all the abuse he and his signature domestic policy achievement have taken from political opponents, conservative ideologues, and ill-informed health care consumers. But the official even more entitled to a victory lap was Solicitor General Donald S. Verrilli Jr., who argued and won both of the cases the court decided today.
Verrilli, it will be recalled, was panned after his arguments three years ago in the first Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act. Yet he emerged victorious in the 5-4 decision, NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), when Roberts crucially bought Verrilli’s fallback argument that the individual mandate could be viewed as a constitutional tax even if beyond Congress’s powers over interstate commerce.
The court’s new decision, King v. Burwell, is a purer victory for the S.G.’s office. Roberts’ 21-page opinion for a 6-3 majority subscribes to the government’s arguments virtually lock, stock, and barrel. (For the dissenters, Justice Antonin Scalia would presumably say that the court bought the government’s argument hook, line, and sinker.)
The issue in the case was whether tax credits are available to customers of the new health insurance marketplaces only for exchanges created by the states, not for those established by the feds under a fallback provision. Despite countless pages of argumentation in legal briefs, the argument came down to the meaning of two phrases in the law: one referring to “an exchange established by the state” (section 1311) and another referring to the federal government’s establishment “of such exchange” (section 1321).
As a main proposition, Verrilli argued that the later reference to “such exchange” unambiguously equated exchanges created by the federal government with those created by the states — and thus tax credits were available to customers either way. Roberts disagreed. The text of the law “is ambiguous,” he wrote two-thirds of the way through his opinion. But both before and after that passage, Roberts viewed the law — its purpose and structure — just as Verrilli had presented it. And, just like Verrilli, Roberts concluded that the law could not possibly work — and could not possibly have been intended to work — the way depicted by the plaintiffs and the anti-Obamacare forces lined up behind them.
Roberts opened by explaining that the Affordable Care Act’s key provisions are “closely intertwined.” The guaranteed issue and community rating provisions require insurers to cover all comers, without raising premiums based on a person’s health. The individual mandate guarded against the resulting possibility that people would wait until they were sick to buy insurance – and thus drive up rates for those in the insurance pool. And to make the insurance mandate affordable subsidies were provided for those below specified income levels.
Back in oral arguments [March 4], Verrilli argued that the argument offered on behalf of four Virginians recruited by the anti-Obamacare Competitive Enterprise Institute would doom the intricately constructed system. Without subsidies, the Department of Health and Human Services would have to establish “rump exchanges that are doomed to fail.” He continued: “That cannot be the statute that Congress intended.”
Roberts agreed — with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and four liberal justices voting along with him. The plaintiffs had “strong” arguments about the plain meaning of the text, he acknowledged, but their argument would “destabilize” insurance markets in the states — 34 in all — that have not established their own exchanges. Congress could not have intended the law to work that way, Roberts wrote — significantly quoting as authority the four dissenters from the earlier Obamacare ruling.
Despite “inartful drafting” in the law, Roberts said that the court had to interpret the ambiguous passage based on “the broader structure” of the act. He expressly rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that Congress had meant to withhold subsides from the federal exchanges in order to encourage the states to take on the job. Congress would have been more explicit in making that threat if that was its purpose, he said.
Writing for the three dissenters, Scalia railed at the decision in a 21-page opinion summarized from the bench and laced with Scaliaisms: “interpretive jiggery-pokery,” he called Roberts’ opinion. The key term — “exchange established by the state” — could have only one meaning; any other construction was “quite absurd.” He ended by accusing the majority of distorting statutory interpretation only because they liked the law so much. That would be news to Roberts, no great fan of the law in the earlier case, and to Kennedy, who voted with Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. to throw out the act in its entirety.
Verrilli’s victory in the important housing discrimination case decided before the Obamacare ruling attracted less attention immediately, but was equally significant — and the outcome equally uncertain beforehand. Kennedy wrote for a five-justice majority in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. in ruling that the federal Fair Housing Act encompasses claims that decisions by developers or housing authorities may be illegal if they have a “disparate impact” on racial or ethnic minorities without justification. There is more to be said about that decision, but in a later column.
Obama had good reason to feel vindicated and relieved after all the abuse he and his signature domestic policy achievement have taken from political opponents, conservative ideologues, and ill-informed health care consumers. But the official even more entitled to a victory lap was Solicitor General Donald S. Verrilli Jr., who argued and won both of the cases the court decided today.
Verrilli, it will be recalled, was panned after his arguments three years ago in the first Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act. Yet he emerged victorious in the 5-4 decision, NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), when Roberts crucially bought Verrilli’s fallback argument that the individual mandate could be viewed as a constitutional tax even if beyond Congress’s powers over interstate commerce.
The court’s new decision, King v. Burwell, is a purer victory for the S.G.’s office. Roberts’ 21-page opinion for a 6-3 majority subscribes to the government’s arguments virtually lock, stock, and barrel. (For the dissenters, Justice Antonin Scalia would presumably say that the court bought the government’s argument hook, line, and sinker.)
The issue in the case was whether tax credits are available to customers of the new health insurance marketplaces only for exchanges created by the states, not for those established by the feds under a fallback provision. Despite countless pages of argumentation in legal briefs, the argument came down to the meaning of two phrases in the law: one referring to “an exchange established by the state” (section 1311) and another referring to the federal government’s establishment “of such exchange” (section 1321).
As a main proposition, Verrilli argued that the later reference to “such exchange” unambiguously equated exchanges created by the federal government with those created by the states — and thus tax credits were available to customers either way. Roberts disagreed. The text of the law “is ambiguous,” he wrote two-thirds of the way through his opinion. But both before and after that passage, Roberts viewed the law — its purpose and structure — just as Verrilli had presented it. And, just like Verrilli, Roberts concluded that the law could not possibly work — and could not possibly have been intended to work — the way depicted by the plaintiffs and the anti-Obamacare forces lined up behind them.
Roberts opened by explaining that the Affordable Care Act’s key provisions are “closely intertwined.” The guaranteed issue and community rating provisions require insurers to cover all comers, without raising premiums based on a person’s health. The individual mandate guarded against the resulting possibility that people would wait until they were sick to buy insurance – and thus drive up rates for those in the insurance pool. And to make the insurance mandate affordable subsidies were provided for those below specified income levels.
Back in oral arguments [March 4], Verrilli argued that the argument offered on behalf of four Virginians recruited by the anti-Obamacare Competitive Enterprise Institute would doom the intricately constructed system. Without subsidies, the Department of Health and Human Services would have to establish “rump exchanges that are doomed to fail.” He continued: “That cannot be the statute that Congress intended.”
Roberts agreed — with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and four liberal justices voting along with him. The plaintiffs had “strong” arguments about the plain meaning of the text, he acknowledged, but their argument would “destabilize” insurance markets in the states — 34 in all — that have not established their own exchanges. Congress could not have intended the law to work that way, Roberts wrote — significantly quoting as authority the four dissenters from the earlier Obamacare ruling.
Despite “inartful drafting” in the law, Roberts said that the court had to interpret the ambiguous passage based on “the broader structure” of the act. He expressly rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that Congress had meant to withhold subsides from the federal exchanges in order to encourage the states to take on the job. Congress would have been more explicit in making that threat if that was its purpose, he said.
Writing for the three dissenters, Scalia railed at the decision in a 21-page opinion summarized from the bench and laced with Scaliaisms: “interpretive jiggery-pokery,” he called Roberts’ opinion. The key term — “exchange established by the state” — could have only one meaning; any other construction was “quite absurd.” He ended by accusing the majority of distorting statutory interpretation only because they liked the law so much. That would be news to Roberts, no great fan of the law in the earlier case, and to Kennedy, who voted with Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. to throw out the act in its entirety.
Verrilli’s victory in the important housing discrimination case decided before the Obamacare ruling attracted less attention immediately, but was equally significant — and the outcome equally uncertain beforehand. Kennedy wrote for a five-justice majority in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. in ruling that the federal Fair Housing Act encompasses claims that decisions by developers or housing authorities may be illegal if they have a “disparate impact” on racial or ethnic minorities without justification. There is more to be said about that decision, but in a later column.
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