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Article I, Section 08, Clause 09 of the United States Constitution

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Guest Essayist: Charles K. Rowley, Ph.D., Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University and General Director of The Locke Institute

Article I, Section 8, Clause 9

 9:  To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

There is much more to these seemingly simple words than meets the eye.  Indeed, one cannot write meaningfully about them without first advancing to Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution:  The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.  The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

 It is not my intent to deal with Article III, Section 1 more than is minimally necessary for making sense of Article I, Section 8, Clause 9.  I ask the reader’s indulgence to this end.

It is noteworthy that Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution establishes one federal Supreme Court only for the entire United States, and that it separates the powers of this court from those of Congress and the executive.  By establishing just one Supreme Court, the Founders provided for a uniformity of interpretation of the federal laws that otherwise might not have been forthcoming.  By establishing the Supreme Court as separate from the Congress the Founders benefited from the genius of James Madison who built in checks and balances as a response to the Connecticut Compromise that provided equal representation to all the States in the Senate of the United States.  Prior to that Compromise, Madison’s Virginia Plan had advocated subservience of the Supreme Court to the Congress.

Note, however, that the Constitution does not itself create judicial bodies other than the Supreme Court.  The Congress alone – not the Supreme Court not the Executive – is empowered, should it so choose, to take responsibility for such matters.  Exactly how it should do so and in what form would be subjected to close scrutiny of the precise meaning of the wording of the Constitution.

In one – and in my judgment convincing – interpretation, the power given to Congress in Article I, Section 8, Clause 9 ‘To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme court’ plainly relates to the power given to Congress in Article III, Section 1 to ordain and establish inferior Courts.  If such is the case, then Article I empowers Congress to establish inferior judicial bodies (tribunals and courts being viewed as synonyms). And Article III reaches out to the tenure conditions attached to all such judges.

Since, in practice, Article I tribunals have not been viewed as identical to Article III courts, however, a careful parsing of the relevant words becomes essential, even if only to explain unjustifiable error.

As always, in parsing the words of the Constitution, it is important to rely upon the meaning of words in 1787, not those of the early twenty-first century.  To this end, I shall rely on the written records of the Founding Fathers and of the major dictionaries of that era, such as those of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster.

The term ‘tribunal’, to be sure, carries a distinctive historical connotation, derived from the Roman tribunate, a raised platform on which the seats of magistrates were placed.  The term ‘court’, by contrast, derives from the judiciary’s close association in England and France with the king.  However, by Blackstone’s day, the terms were viewed as synonyms in all the major dictionaries. Throughout the early deliberations of the Philadelphia Convention, the Founding Fathers also used the two terms interchangeably, as does Hamilton in Federalist No. 81. Of course, such evidence does not guarantee that the Constitution itself deploys the term ‘tribunal’ under Article I as a synonym for the term ‘court’ under Article III.

There is some support from the drafting history for the view that the Constitution distinguishes between the two concepts.  The distinction may have grown out of the mid-convention debates over the possibility of employing some non-life-tenured judges to adjudicate federal claims.  Specifically, Congress might appoint state tribunals to act as courts of first instance in deciding questions of federal law.  Madison’s notes from the debates offer support for such a change in emphasis once the New Jersey Plan and the Virginia Plan were jettisoned following the Connecticut Compromise.  For the Compromise eliminated an early provision that mandated the creation of lower federal courts and substituted a regime of congressional discretion (as confirmed by Articles I and III).  At this point, the Committee of Detail dropped the usage of the term ‘tribunals’ to describe the federal courts in Article III, and it required life-tenured judges in Article III courts, while refusing to impose any such requirement for Article 1 tribunals.

Further support for distinguishing between Article I tribunals and Article III courts may be discerned in the empowerment provisions themselves.  Article I empowers Congress to ‘constitute tribunals interior to the supreme court’, whereas Article III empowers Congress to ordain and establish courts.  This difference in description of congressional powers is suggestive that the two adjudicative bodies might arise in different ways and with different degrees of permanence.  Specifically, Congress might ‘constitute’ tribunals either by creating new bodies from scratch, or by designating existing bodies as inferior tribunals.  To ‘ordain and establish’ inferior courts, by contrast, seems to contemplate the creation of new courts established in accordance with Article III.  Such a fine distinction is in accordance with the major dictionaries of the late eighteenth century.

In any event, Congress has exploited such parsing opportunities in order to distinguish clearly between Article I tribunals and Article III courts (A fairly good guide to congressional behavior in general is that if you give it an inch it will take a kilometer).  From the outset, Congress has established some (but not all) Article I tribunals without the Article III safeguards of life-tenure and remuneration.  These tribunals consist of certain federal courts and other forms of adjudicative bodies, endowed with differing levels of independence from the legislative and executive branches.  Some take the form of legislative courts set up by Congress to review agency decisions; others take the form of military courts-martial appeal courts, ancillary courts with judges appointed by Article III and administrative judges.

As one would predict, Congress (and the Executive) does not always relish the idea that Article I tribunals should be inferior to the Supreme Court.  Yet that is an inescapable reading of the Constitution.  The specification that tribunals and lower courts must remain inferior cements the requirement of the Supreme Court’s ultimate supremacy.  The requirement of inferiority precludes Congress (and by clear implication, the executive branch) from creating free-standing courts, investing them with some portion of judicial power, and giving them freedom from oversight and control of the Supreme Court.  In this regard, the Founders were only too mindful of such abuses of executive power by the Stuart kings in England’s not-so-far-distant past.

This portrait of Article I tribunals as acting outside of the judicial power, while remaining subject to oversight and control by Article III courts is reflected in modern jurisprudence.  However much it would like to do so, Congress (and the Executive) cannot create tribunals and place them entirely beyond the supervisory authority of the federal courts.

The most pressing recent variant of this logic effectively deals with the decision by President George W. Bush to create military tribunals for the adjudication of criminal claims against individuals designated as enemy combatants.  Although the government has argued for an exceedingly restricted judicial role in overseeing such tribunals, the Constitution clearly requires that they must remain inferior to the Supreme Court and subject to judicial review, at least when such tribunals operate within the jurisdiction of the United States.

Americans should be eternally thankful to the Founders for providing us with such protections, both under Article I and under Article III of the Constitution.  Unless the parchment unravels completely, there will be no Court of the Star Chamber, no Court of High Commission, and no Bloody Assize in the Unites States of America.

Charles K. Rowley, Ph.D. is Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University and General Director of The Locke Institute in Fairfax, Virginia.  He is author of Liberty and the State (The Locke Institute 1993), co-author (with Nathanael Smith) of Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government (The Locke Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs 2009), and the author of Never Let A Good Crisis Go To Waste (The Locke Institute 2010).  For further details see www.thelockeinstitute.org and www.charlesrowley.wordpress.com

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Federalist No. 73 – The Provision for the Support of the Executive, and the Veto Power, From the New York Packet (Hamilton)

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Guest Essayist: Charles K. Rowley, Ph.D., Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University and General Director of The Locke Institute in Fairfax, Virginia

Federalist # 73 continues with a discussion of the President, dealing particularly with the independence of the executive branch of government and the relevance of the veto power.  As readers will know, Hamilton, more than any other Founding Father, believes in the importance of centralized authority within the federal system, even to the extent of flirting with monarchy.  Although he is writing as PUBLIUS, and reflects to a certain degree, the views of his colleagues, John Jay and James Madison, let me forewarn readers of concerns that most particularly should exercise our minds when reviewing the powers of any centralized presidential authority.

“In constraining any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no better end in all his actions, than private interest” (David Hume, 1752).  “It is better to keep the wolf out the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and claws after he shall have entered” (Thomas Jefferson 1782).  “The very principle of constitutional government requires it to be assumed that political power will be abused to promote the particular purposes of the holder; not because it always is so, but because such is the natural tendency of things, to guard against which is the especial use of free institutions” (John Stuart Mill 1861). So we have been warned!

Now let us review Hamilton’s reasoning in Federalist # 73 in the light of subsequent experience.  As to the issue of support, I have no problem.  Hamilton correctly defends Article II, Section 1, clause 7 of the proposed constitution confirming that the President’s compensation for his services shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he has been elected, and shall constitute his sole emolument from the United States or any individual state.  This protection and constraint is essential to avoid excessive pressure being placed on the President by Congress to pursue goals that others are determined to achieve.  What could not be foreseen, in the late eighteenth-century, is the degree to which the promise of high post-presidential monetary returns may influence the behavior in office of any sitting president.  Presidential libraries, for example, play a significant role in determining the evaluated legacy of any president.  Such libraries are exorbitantly expensive to establish and to maintain.  And no United States president, in recent times, has died in relative poverty – this in sharp contrast to many prime ministers in parliamentary systems of government.

Hamilton’s discussion of Article 1, Section 7 of the proposed constitution is much more interesting.  For here Hamilton balances the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed qualified negative (or veto) power of the President with respect to acts or resolutions of the two houses of the legislature.  In defending this power, Hamilton walks a tight-rope between his belief in strong central authority and his recognition that all political power must be checked and balanced if a republic is long to survive.

In rejecting outright any notion that the president should serve devoid of veto power, Hamilton displays – not without considerable justice in the light of subsequent events – his grave misgivings about the potential for bad behavior of any legislative branch of government.  Instinctively, he recognizes that a largely self-serving legislature would succumb to the temptation to impose its will upon a defenseless president in the absence of presidential armor.  The question, for Hamilton, is only whether that armor should be absolute or qualified.

At this point, in my judgment, Hamilton blinks when confronting the likely true nature of a president’s political role.  Surely he acknowledges some force in the argument that it is ‘not to be presumed a single man would possess more virtue and wisdom than a number of men; and that unless this perception should be entertained, it would be improper to give the executive magistrate any species of control over the legislative body.’  However, he dismisses this concern on the ground that the more significant danger emanates from the predatory ambitions of the legislature.  At the time, the Founders had in mind the name of George Washington, as their most preferred first president.  And few would deny that George Washington was a man of wisdom, impeccable personal integrity, and high honor.  But would one feel as comfortable in making those suppositions about a Ulysses S. Grant, an Andrew Jackson, a Franklin Roosevelt, or a Richard Nixon?  I do not think so.

In any event, thankfully, Hamilton comes down in favor of a qualified-over an absolute-veto, albeit by faulty analysis, and almost certainly because he is writing as PUBLIUS and not as Hamilton.  Hamilton’s concern is not at all over the prospect that an absolute-veto power would be sorely abused – which surely would have proved to be the case – but rather that such a power might be under-utilized by presidents whose scruples might hold them back from exercising powers of such a magnitude.  History advises us that homo politicus pervades the executive branch of government just as much as he pervades the legislative branch.  Presidents would have deployed absolute-veto power quite unscrupulously, as if to the manner born.

The central issue in Federalist # 73 thus centers on the degree to which the veto power is to be qualified.  Hamilton defends the requirement of a two-third majority in each house of the legislature to override a presidential veto and to pass a vetoed-bill into law.  This super-majority, of course, is arbitrary, but, in principle can be justified.

In viewing the legislative process from an economic perspective, it is useful to reflect upon two expected costs of any kind of collective choice.  On the one side, are aggregated expected external costs that collective actions may impose on individual electors.  Expected external costs decline as the requisite vote super-majority increases.  On the other side, are the expected costs of reaching legislative decisions.  These costs increase as the requisite vote-majority increases.  A rational vote-mechanism will try to minimize the joint expected external and decision-making costs.  Evidently, as the salience of an issue rises, so the super-majority vote-requirement should increase.  If, in general, presidents contemplate the veto more with respect to major than to minor bills, then the qualified majority rule is economically justified, because expected external costs are higher in such a situation.

The debate over Hamilton’s defense of the qualified-negative naturally focused on analogies with the British monarchy, with many commentators noting that the unjustifiable rights and privileges of the British monarch should vehemently be denied to any United States president.  For the most part, Hamilton claimed that the veto power was defensive in nature, allowing the president to defend the People against excessive legislative zeal, not to allow the president to impose his own will on the People.  Such arguments prevailed in the ratification process.

With hindsight, however, Hamilton was wrong in this assessment.  The qualified-veto power has provided presidents with considerable opportunities to exercise a third-chamber role in the legislature.  The knowledge, ex ante, that a president will veto an unacceptable bill, forces the legislature to logroll with the president when formulating major bills, in order to anticipate and to frustrate the application of a veto.  Increasingly, unscrupulous presidents have taken advantage of this recognition to shift from defense into aggression in the legislative process not always, by any means, to the advantage of the People.

As the regulatory authority of the executive branch increased – most notably since the Civil War – so the legislative powers of the presidency have advanced, to the extent that, arguably, they now exceed those enjoyed by any British monarch even at the peak of the Divine Right principle.  Health care reform, fiscal stimulus, cap and trade, card-check, and immigration policies have been driven and fashioned, since January 2009, much less by the Democrat-controlled Congress, than by the administration of President Obama.  These policy initiatives, in many respects, may turn out to be inimical to the underlying interests of the People.

Predictably, public officials imbued with power constantly ask for more.  That is the true nature of homo politicus.  Instinctively, therefore, the People – who by nature cherish their lives, liberties and properties – should recoil instinctively from any attempt to extend such power.  The line-item veto is just such an example.

The line-item veto, or partial veto, is the power of an executive authority to nullify or cancel specific provisions of a bill – usually a budget appropriations bill – without vetoing the entire legislative package.  Such line-item vetoes are usually qualified by legislative override provisions.  In 1986, President Ronald Reagan, in his State of the Union Address, asked the Congress for such an authority: “Give me the authority to veto waste, and I’ll take the responsibility, I’ll make the cuts, I’ll take the heat.”  The Congress refused this overture, not least because the Democrat-majority in the House of Representatives sensibly anticipated that much more than waste would be vetoed by this president on the social side of the budget.

In 1995, President Bill Clinton repeated this request in his State of the Union address.  An unwise Congress granted his request in the Line Item Veto Act of 1996.  President Clinton deployed this power 82 times in 11 budget bills, until the United States Supreme Court correctly determined, in 1998, that unilateral amendment or repeal of only parts of a statute violate the Presentment Clause of the Constitution.  Ambitious presidents ceaselessly search for such additional authority.  President George W. Bush once again requested a line-item veto power in 2006, this time setting out a complex process designed to avoid the Supreme Court ruling.  Fortunately, the loss of any Republican-majority in Congress intervened to deny him this dangerous privilege.

The executive branch currently enjoys excessive power in the United States political process, threatening the replacement of the separation of powers by the imposition of an Imperial Presidency.  The People will be wise indeed to constrain, rather than to extend, the powers of the executive branch – not least by revisiting the expansive interpretations of the General Welfare and the Commerce clauses by the Supreme Court – if our precious constitutional republic is long to survive repeated attempts to subvert its original design.

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Charles K. Rowley, Ph.D. is Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University and General Director of The Locke Institute in Fairfax, Virginia.  He is co-author (with Nathanael Smith) of Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government. The Locke Institute (#).  He blog s- at #.

 

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