Constitutional Interpretation and Change

by Jeremy Leaming

Even before the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in two cases dealing with government discrimination of gay couples who want to get married, a growing chorus of legal scholars and others urged the high court to move slowly. Because, according to these folks, if the justices declare that lesbians and gay men have a constitutionally protected right to wed, a backlash against the marriage equality movement could be unleashed.

And proof for such a backlash centers on the high court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade opinion, which found that the right of privacy includes the right of women to make their own decisions on abortion. According to proponents of moving slowly on marriage equality, Roe sparked a backlash against growing support of abortion and now we have state after state trying to trample the fundamental right. Therefore the backlash proponents argue that the justices should learn from Roe and avoid handing down a ruling that would end government discrimination against gay couples seeking to wed. This backlash story has been fueled in part by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who while defending the Roe decision, said the Court moved to fast.

But as an editorial in The New York Times notes, the backlash proponents are basing their argument on a “false reading of politics before and after Roe v. Wade ….” The editorial cites the work of ACS Board Members Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel, both teach at Yale Law School, documenting the fact that the fevered opposition to reproductive rights was forming long before the high court handed down Roe.

In a 2010 interview with ACSblog, highlighting their Before Roe v. Wade book, Greenhouse and Siegel said the documentation they collected for the book showed “that, contrary to the commonly expressed view that it was the Supreme Court and its decision that unleashed a ‘backlash’ against abortion reform, a vigorous counter-movement was forming well before Roe. In the late 1960s, as public support for liberalization surged, the Catholic Church helped organized an anti-abortion movement to oppose liberalization in every state legislature and court considering abortion laws. Strategists for President Nixon’s 1972 re-election then decided to denounce ‘permissive’ abortion laws to attract Catholics from their longtime affiliation with the Democratic Party and court the support of a ‘silent majority.’”

by Andrew Koppelman, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law, Northwestern University Law School

Last spring, the Supreme Court came within one vote of taking health insurance away from over 30 million people, exposing a dangerous intellectual trend that, simply put, threatens to hurt you and your family. The near-success of the constitutional arguments against the Affordable Care Act is scary news, because those arguments silently rely on a philosophy at war with the most fundamental purpose of the Constitution: to empower the American people to solve their most pressing problems.

The ACA included an individual mandate to have insurance, because no other path to universal insurance was workable. Even Republicans had supported such a mandate for years. Universal health insurance logically means that everyone must have insurance. 

The litigation depended on a different ideal, which we can call Tough Luck Libertarianism: any obligation of healthy people to contribute to care for the sick is an intolerable imposition on liberty; if you get sick and can’t pay for care, that’s your tough luck.

The constitutional challenge was devised by conservative lawyers who had, for a long time, been eager to impose limits on Congressional power. They proposed a new and previously unheard-of constitutional rule:  the state can’t make you do things or buy things. It may regulate only those who engage in some self-initiated action.

This action/inaction distinction came advertised as a great bulwark of liberty. Actually, it was a crude bit of political opportunism. No one can live in the world without engaging in self-initiated actions all the time. This rule is not a serious constraint on government power. It allows Congress to act in every case in which the citizen has voluntarily taken some action. Most of us can’t realistically avoid having jobs and buying things, and it’s not much consolation to be told that I can avoid oppression if I live in the woods and eat berries. This limitation is unlikely to have any application after the ACA litigation, and is patently tailored to bring about a desired result in a single case.