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06 October 19
FOCUS: The Supreme Court Isn't Your Friend, Liberals
Jack Schwartz, The Daily Beast
Schwartz writes: "What liberals and conservatives have in common in their current struggle over the complexion and purpose of the Supreme Court is that both harken back to their own distinct myths that serve as literal benchmarks on the nature of the federal judiciary."
Jack Schwartz, The Daily Beast
Schwartz writes: "What liberals and conservatives have in common in their current struggle over the complexion and purpose of the Supreme Court is that both harken back to their own distinct myths that serve as literal benchmarks on the nature of the federal judiciary."
EXCERPT:
One of the most illustrative moments in this narrative is how we arrived at the hallowed number of nine justices. It turns out that Andrew Jackson added two political cronies to the Supreme Court on his last day in office in 1837 with the collusion of a compliant Democratic Congress, thus expanding the number of judges from what till then had been seven. We can only wonder what Mitch McConnell, who held up Merrick Garland’s nomination during an election year, would have thought of such goings-on. Apparently, Jackson’s ploy as he was going out the door has gone unremarked by the critics of FDR’s court-packing scheme. For good measure, five of Jackson’s later appointees came from slave states—including his choice for chief justice, Roger Taney, whose court handed down the infamous Dred Scott decision.
Following the Civil War, the Supreme Court played a major role in impeding Reconstruction, curbing federal troops from protecting freemen in the former Confederacy and ultimately invalidating the Civil Rights Act of 1875. While the high court in effect gave a free hand to Klan terror in the South, it cracked down on labor unions in the industrializing North.
As Richard White demonstrates in The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, it was during the Gilded Age that the Supreme Court and its federal tributaries hit full stride in terms of rampant judicial activism on behalf of a privileged class. While both Congress and state legislatures passed a considerable amount of labor reforms in response to the excesses of industrialization in the years between 1880 and 1900, the judiciary struck down over 60 of those laws.
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