Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia: “Well Doctor,
what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
Dr. Benjamin Franklin: “A Republic, if you
can keep it.”
-- Upon exiting the
Constitutional Convention of 1787, Philadelphia
Last week, Boston Globe columnist
Jeff
Jacoby decried
what has transpired in New London, Connecticut in the aftermath of the
Supreme Court’s historic decision in Kelo v. New London.
Kelo upheld, by a 5-4 vote, a broad
interpretation of the State’s eminent domain power, endorsing the principle
that under the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment, “public use”
includes the seizing of private property by the State and the transfer of that
property to another private party in pursuit of an economic development agenda.
Jacoby wrote, “[H]omeowners
were dispossessed for nothing. Fort Trumbull was never redeveloped. Pfizer
itself bailed out of New London in 2009. The Kelo decision was a disaster…”
In her dissenting opinion in Kelo, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote,
“The
beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence
and power in the political process.” O’Connor was right, just as Jacoby is
right to bemoan what has transpired in New London.
However, O’Connor and Jacoby fall victim to the same logical
fallacies: that a power that can be
abused should not exist at all and that the Constitution, rather than the People,
is our most sturdy bulwark against tyranny.
Indeed, it is the machinery of democracy—separation
of powers, checks and balances, the voting booth—that forms the greatest safeguard of liberty. Congress has the power to declare war, but
it must answer to the People. The President can make treaties, but he too must
face the citizens at the polls. In the
end, the Constitution is not meant to save us from ourselves. It merely gives
us a Republic, which we the People must keep, as Benjamin Franklin famously
said in 1787.
Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States Howard Chandler Christy, 1940 |
Kelo is far from the only case that
poses questions related to constitutional vs. political checks. In National Federation of Independent Business
v. Sebelius (the Obamacare case), Justice Scalia famously
asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli whether the government could force
Americans to purchase broccoli. Verrilli chose to try to differentiate broccoli
from health insurance, but the best answer to Scalia’s question was to explain
that political rather than constitutional checks must be relied on
to limit the scope of Congressional and Executive authority.
Indeed,
then-Solicitor General Elena Kagan (disclosure: When Kagan was Dean of
Harvard Law School we had several interactions concerning the school’s
relationship with the independently-run Harvard
Law Record) answered this query best when confronted by Senator Tom Coburn
(R-OK) during her confirmation hearing.
Sen. Coburn asked,
“If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said, ‘Americans, you have to eat three
vegetables and three fruits every day,’ and I got it through Congress and it’s
now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the commerce clause?” Kagan
responded, “Sounds like a dumb law.”
In other
words, while there may be no constitutional limit to Congress passing
such a law, the reason that Coburn’s hypothetical will never come to pass is
because our politics would not allow it. The genius of our system assumed the
vitality of those political checks and therefore permitted a broad enumeration
of powers without the fear that the powers would be “taken to their limit.”
[As a side
note, whether the government could force an individual to eat broccoli is a different matter entirely. I believe that the
long-standing respect for bodily integrity at common law would mean that such a
law would be a violation of 5th Amendment Due Process (which is
superseded only in very narrow circumstances of absolute necessity, see
generally Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905) (upholding mandatory vaccination
under the 14th Amendment)).]
In The
Tempting of America, conservative legal scholar Robert Bork—once
himself a nominee to the Supreme Court—declared, “Judges and lawyers live on the slippery slope
of analogies; they are not supposed to ski it to the bottom.”
Bork was describing how the creation of new constitutional principles by judges
(as opposed to the application of old principles to new circumstances) had the
unintended consequence of generating additional principles even further
separated from the original constitutional text.
However, Bork’s
elegant phrase can also be used to support a different idea about American
constitutionalism: namely, that while
power can inevitably be abused, that does not mean that the power—standing alone—must
be curtailed. Rather, it imposes on each of us, as citizens of the
Republic, a duty to keep close watch on our officials, ensure the vitality and
transparency of our public institutions, and engage with the great struggles of
our time.
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