Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/courts-in-the-age-of-dysfunction
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 10:19:56+00:00

Document:
Otto von Bismarck is reported to have said that there is a “special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.”1 If so, the Holy One has fallen down on the job lately. The nation’s political system seems completely incapable of solving, or even grappling with, its most pressing problems. Washington policymakers seem bent on austerity in the midst of stagnation, essentially unlearning the most basic macroeconomic lessons of the last sixty years.2 Rising powers such as China make massive investments in infrastructure and education, while in this country, our infrastructure falls apart and we slash education funding.3 Not content with inaction, in the summer of 2011 the House of Representatives chose to imitate developing country debt crises by creating one of its own, threatening the nation’s credit and leading to a debt downgrade. This self-inflicted wound has led some to suspect that—whether or not the nation’s credit rating deserves AAA—its political system does not.
Indeed, the last few years have seen thoughtful commentators on both the right and the left beginning to speculate as to whether the American political system is collapsing under its own weight. As we have moved from the American Century to the Post-American World, America itself has reached the Age of Dysfunction, when the formal institutions of U.S. constitutional government have become impotent to deal with the nation’s most important challenges.
Benjamin Ewing and Douglas Kysar seek a way out, suggesting that the dysfunction is more one of intellectual imagination than of constitutional design.4 Amending “checks and balances,” they propose seeing American separation of powers as a system of “prods and pleas,” where different branches can incent others to address problems.
I am fairly skeptical of the ability of prods and pleas to augment checks and balances. As I shall suggest, the very nature of the Age of Dysfunction implies that pleas will have little role to play. But the prods/pleas model reveals an important insight: the Constitution’s multiplicity of veto points means that the nation’s founding document also creates potentially effective government institutions. Instead of bemoaning their lack of institutional competence, courts should embrace their legal capacity to improve policymaking outside the constitutional realm.
I thus attempt in this short Essay to extend Ewing and Kysar’s model and provide some guidelines concerning when courts should take up a prodding role. When does political branch behavior constitute genuine dysfunction, and when does it merely reflect the proper—if occasionally messy—operation of constitutional checks and balances? In proposing three areas where this traditional problem can be mitigated or avoided, I thus hope to provide constructive suggestions about when judicial prods might be useful and legitimate.
One might well ask whether the dysfunction will last if the GOP achieves unified control over all branches of government in the upcoming elections, a reasonably probable occurrence at this writing. Although a complete argument on this point cannot be achieved within the constraints of either space or the reader’s patience, here are two answers.
First, it seems reasonable to assume that Democrats in a Senate minority will return the favor of the McConnell leadership: even if they filibuster with only half the frequency that Republicans have done, it would still amount to more filibusters than any Congress prior to the 110th. As the historical statistics indicate, although Democrats are not the causes of the increase in filibusters, they have not returned the institution to preexisting norms when finding themselves in the minority.23 Moreover, Democratic filibusters are most likely in areas such as Medicare, which stands as a principal driver of long-term deficits, and thus are commensurately most likely to be the target of proactive legislation by a Republican Congress.
Second, even if Republicans achieve unified control, it is reasonable to assume that they will maintain governmental dysfunction. On the eve of the Democratic takeover in 2006, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein comprehensively demonstrated that Republican rule in the House and Senate was so partisan and ideological as to yield institutional decline and an inability to respond to the nation’s problems. Under a Republican President, GOP congressional majorities became completely supine and thoroughly abdicated their oversight responsibilities. The abandonment of “regular order”—considering legislation in subcommittee and committee, and allowing amendments—meant that legislation was often written in the middle of the night by leadership staff and lobbyists, yielding incoherent legislation that took rent-seeking to new levels. Quite often, even committee chairs had no idea what was in the bills they jammed through their panels. These trends derived in large part from the GOP’s ideological vision.24 To be sure, this is a different sort of dysfunction than the inability to confirm appointments, but it is a dysfunction nonetheless.
McConnell also confirmed that this strategy has become “the new normal” for Republicans.26 The Age of Dysfunction is here to stay.
In the context of this political dysfunction, Ewing and Kysar’s support for pleas seems more than a little naïve: why make a plea to someone who refuses to listen as a matter of principle? Perhaps Ewing and Kysar use “prods and pleas” because it sounds nice in opposition to “checks and balances.” But in the Age of Dysfunction, a plea and $1.75 will get you a cup of coffee at your local Starbucks.
Previous scholarship has focused either on the constitutionality of the filibuster43 or analyses of the filibuster in the context of judicial appointments.44 In the Age of Dysfunction, however, we might ask a somewhat more subtle question: how should the normalization of filibusters affect common law adjudication and statutory interpretation?
My first suggested principle, then, is that courts should be more willing to prod other branches when attempts to solve social problems have been met with a filibuster. The filibuster provides a particularly clear indication of a political process failure, and thus legislative inaction should receive less deference from the judiciary. If the House passes a bill that has presidential backing and majority support in the Senate, then the failure of that bill to become law might be acceptable within our constitutional system but hardly represents the workings of effective (or perhaps even democratic46) government. This suggestion carries the important merit of clear discernibility: when a bill is brought up, it either achieves cloture or it does not.
Climate regulation represents a good but not perfect example of how the use of filibusters signaled a breakdown in the political process.47 In June 2009, the House approved the American Clean Energy and Security Act, a cap-and-trade framework for regulating greenhouse gases, sometimes known as the Waxman-Markey Act after its two primary authors. The President signaled his support, and a majority of Senators supported a substantially similar legislative scheme. But neither cap-and-trade nor any other form of climate legislation stood any chance in the Senate: no bill could attract a supermajority of sixty votes and achieve cloture. The prospect of a filibuster killed any hopes of the bill’s passage.48 That makes climate change a suitable subject for a prod.
Does this constitute a problem that warrants judicial intervention? One might well say not. Congress has a right to be ignorant, and in the case of the current House of Representatives, it appears to have exercised that right to the fullest extent. But the judiciary’s commitment to “reasoned elaboration”53 implies that it is also committed to reason, and attacks on science constitute an attack on reason itself.54 One need not adopt quaint Langdellian notions of “legal science”55 to see that—as an institution—the courts provide a very congenial forum for rational, scientific inquiry. Thus, my second suggestion is that the judiciary should be more willing to prod when the political branches have rejected science as a basis of policymaking.
According to this relatively conservative formulation, judicial action in this area will be rare. Scientists often disagree, and the patterns of scientific inquiry emphasize uncertainty. But climate change is one place where judicial action is clearly warranted: the scientific consensus about the veracity of anthropogenic climate change is deep, broad, and robust.
One could find a reason why, despite overwhelming scientific evidence, Congress might not have taken action on climate change. For instance, Congress might believe that it should not tie the President’s hands in negotiating with foreign nations in terms of relative reductions in carbon emissions. If the United States committed to reducing emissions, it would give China or India little incentive to do the same. One might disagree with the wisdom of such an argument, but one could hardly call it irrational.
Perhaps because Ackerman focused on constitutional law, he overlooked the possibility of protecting such groups in other areas. But if a well-working pluralist democracy would overlook such groups, then a dysfunctional one figures to do worse. It stands to reason, then, that our third prodding principle should be that the judiciary should be more inclined to prod in order to protect the interests of groups disadvantaged by pluralist politics.
Such an argument should be familiar, as it essentially recapitulates the broad outlines of Cass Sunstein’s proposal for “substantive” canons of statutory construction.65 Sunstein argued that judges should read ambiguous statutes in such a way as to favor disadvantaged groups, but he did not appear to include the poor in his definition of “disadvantaged,” focusing only on racial minorities.66 This is problematic because, as Ackerman has shown, it is diffuse and invisible minorities who stand to have the biggest problem achieving political success commensurate with their population.
So who are these diffuse and invisible groups? Victims of climate change might even be a better example than the poor. Not only are climate victims diffuse, but in many circumstances they will be invisible even to themselves, as tracing specific causal links between climate change and particular disasters is—at least at this stage—beyond scientific capacity. Many victims of climate change caused by American industry reside in other nations and will thus be unable to affect the political process of the United States. Most importantly, the most severely disadvantaged victims of climate change will not be born for many years, leaving their ability to exercise the franchise somewhat impaired.
The obvious objection to arguing for prods to defend diffuse and invisible groups stems from the supposed inability of the courts to determine which groups actually qualify, and thus constitute worthy recipients of judicial concern. The answer to this objection is a broad and deep scholarly literature that is occupied in doing just that. Much of this literature is used by conservative jurists to justify government inaction: regulation will invariably be captured by special interests, or present moral hazard, or reduce economic efficiency.67 So when one attempts to invoke the principle behind this scholarship to justify allowing judges to empower disadvantaged groups, and one is then told by the same people that such an attempt is bound to founder on the rocks of judicial incompetence, one has the right to reply with the sovereign prerogative of laughter. Judges, we are told, cannot be physicists, epidemiologists, generals, intelligence professionals, school principals, or prison officials. But it is not asking too much of them to be well-informed citizens: in many instances, judges aided by the appropriate Brandeis briefs have the same or better competence than legislators to determine the effects of their decisions.
We can find a useful precedent for using this prod in Judge Richard Posner’s dissent in United States v. Marshall.68 A federal statute sets a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for any person convicted of selling more than one gram of a “mixture or substance containing a detectable amount” of LSD.69 The defendant, Marshall, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for conspiring to distribute, and distributing, more than ten grams of LSD, in this case enough for 11,751 doses. The statutory formulation imposes heavy sentences on major retailers of drugs like cocaine or heroin who cut their products with something else. But LSD itself weighs almost nothing, so consumers almost always buy it in combination with a carrier, most commonly blotting paper. Because it is sold by the dose, the weight has no relevance to the transaction. The government claimed, however, that the LSD/blotting paper combination counts as a “mixture” of LSD and paper, essentially mandating that the seller’s sentence may depend largely on the weight of the medium he chooses. Thus, “under the current statutory scheme, and at a weight per dose of .05 milligrams . . . a major dealer would be able to possess up to 20,000 doses of LSD in granular form without subjecting himself to the mandatory five-year minimum penalty”;70 at the same time, a single dose sold on a sugar cube would carry a mandatory five year sentence.71 Marshall challenged this prospect as having no rational basis, such that it violated his right to equal protection.
Jonathan Zasloff is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. For helpful comments and suggestions, he gives thanks to Ann Carlson and the students at the Fall 2011 UCLA Climate Change Law Colloquium. Nick Hoy and the editors of The Yale Law Journal Online provided exceptionally careful and constructive editorial advice.
Preferred citation: Jonathan Zasloff, Courts in the Age of Dysfunction, 121 Yale L.J. Online 479 (2012), http://yalelawjournal.org/forum/courts-in-the-age-of-dysfunction.
Plea, Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plea (last visited Feb. 14, 2012).
See Sinclair, supra note 41, at 7.
See Ewing & Kysar, supra note 4, at 356-57.
Cf. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Law in Science and Science in Law, 12 Harv. L. Rev. 443 (1899).
See Hart & Sacks, supra note 33, at 383.
Restatement (Second) of Torts § 821B (1977).
See id. at 1332 (Posner, J., dissenting).
See id. at 1320-21 (majority opinion).
Id. at 1333 (Posner, J., dissenting).
S.E. Morison, The Oxford History of the United States, 1783-1917, at 413 (1927). There is now very considerable doubt that Bismarck actually said it, as similar quotations have been found from before Bismarck’s public career. The cynicism, however, well expresses the Iron Chancellor’s outlook.
See Ari Berman, How the Austerity Class Rules Washington, Nation, Nov. 7, 2011, http://www.thenation.com/article/164073/how-austerity-class-rules-washington.
See Thomas L. Friedman & Michael Mandelbaum, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (2011).
Benjamin Ewing & Douglas A. Kysar, Prods and Pleas: Limited Government in an Era of Unlimited Harm, 121 Yale L.J. 350 (2011), available at http://yalelawjournal.org/images/pdfs/1021.pdf.
See, e.g., E.J. Dionne Jr., Why Did Congress Waste Six Months?, Wash. Post, July 17, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-did-congress-waste-six-months/2011/07/17/gIQARascKI_story.html (arguing that the debt ceiling crisis “ma[de] the United States look dysfunctional and incompetent to the rest of the world”).
See, e.g., David Brooks, The Vigorous Virtues, N.Y. Times, Sept. 1, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/opinion/brooks-the-vigorous-virtues.html (warning that “[t]here’s a specter haunting American politics: national decline,” and arguing that “Republicans have done almost nothing to grapple with and address . . . deeper structural problems”); David Frum, Why Our Government Is Broken, CNN.com (Sept. 26, 2011, 3:38 PM), http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/26/opinion/frum-broken-government/index.html.
United States of America Long-Term Rating Lowered to “AA+” Due to Political Risks, Rising Debt Burden; Outlook Negative, Standard & Poor’s (Aug. 5, 2011, 8:13 PM), http://www.standardandpoors.com/ratings/articles/en/us/?assetID=1245316529563.
Nate Silver, Unfavorable Ratings for Both Major Parties Near Record Highs, N.Y. Times: FiveThirtyEight (July 23, 2011, 5:00 AM), http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/23/unfavorable-ratings-for-both-major-parties-near-record-highs. The average number of bills that have been signed into law by the president by July 23 of the first session of Congress for the past twenty years is approximately forty. This average was calculated by taking the number of public laws signed by July 23 of the first session of each Congress from the 102nd Congress to the 112th Congress. Data were collected from the CQ Almanac’s Appendix, which lists public laws by session of Congress. Series Appendix, CQ Almanac Online, http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/toc.php?mode=cqalmanac-appendix (last visited Feb. 14, 2012).
Fareed Zakaria, The Debt Deal’s Failure, Time, Aug. 15, 2011, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2086858,00.html.
See, e.g., Sam Hananel, Assoc. Press., Labor Board Headed for Gridlock Again, Yahoo News, Oct. 28, 2011, http://news.yahoo.com/labor-board-headed-gridlock-again-184109170.html (detailing Republican plans to handcuff the NLRB).
Andrew Koppelman, Bad News for Mail Robbers: The Obvious Constitutionality of Health Care Reform, 121 Yale L.J. Online 1, 22 (2011), http://yalelawjournal.org/2011/04/26/koppelman.html.
See, e.g., Lara Marlowe, Right-Wing Republicans Prefer Ruin to Compromise, Irish Times, July 28, 2011, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0728/1224301495723.html.
Julian Sanchez, Frum, Cocktail Parties, and the Threat of Doubt, JulianSanchez.com (Mar. 26, 2010), http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/03/26/frum-cocktail-parties-and-the-threat-of-doubt.
Julian Sanchez, A Coda on Closure, JulianSanchez.com (Apr. 22, 2010), http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/04/22/a-coda-on-closure.
For further discussion of “epistemic closure,” and several prominent examples of it, see Patricia Cohen, “Epistemic Closure”? Those Are Fighting Words, N.Y. Times, Apr. 27, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/books/28conserv.html.
See Julie Rovner, Republicans Spurn Once-Favored Health Mandate, NPR.org (Feb. 15, 2010), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123670612; Summary of a 1993 Republican Health Reform Plan, Kaiser Health News (Feb. 23, 2010), http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2010/February/23/GOP-1993-health-reform-bill.aspx.
Bill Adair & Angie Drobnic Holan, PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: “A Government Takeover of Health Care,” PolitiFact (Dec. 16, 2010, 11:30 PM), http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/dec/16/lie-year-government-takeover-health-care.
See Charles Babington, Assoc. Press., GOP May Okay Tax Increase That Obama Hopes To Block, Yahoo news, Aug. 22, 2011, http://news.yahoo.com/gop-may-ok-tax-increase-obama-hopes-block-124016578.html; see also James Fallows, The GOP Position on Taxes Gets Worse, Atlantic, Aug. 22, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/08/the-gop-position-on-taxes-gets-worse/243930 (noting the “boundless cynicism” of the Republican position).
See Daniel J. Weiss, The GOP Changes Its Tune on Cap and Trade, Ctr. for Am. Progress (Oct. 22, 2010), http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/10/cap_and_trade_gop.html.
Newt Gingrich with Joe DeSantis, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine 4 (2010). On the right, somehow this position coexists with the allegation that President Obama is, in fact, a Muslim. See Beyond Obama Muslim Myth Stands the Right Wing, Media Matters for Am. (Aug. 19, 2010, 7:47 PM), http://mediamatters.org/research/201008190061.
Both the GOP’s ideology and its willingness to create dysfunction in order to accomplish its political goals thus serve as the reasons for what some might consider my overly vituperative attack on the contemporary Republican Party. I list instances and quotations as a way of convincing skeptical readers of at least the high plausibility of my account.
[W]hat seems beyond argument is that the U.S. political system becomes more polarized and more dysfunctional every cycle, at greater and greater human cost. The next Republican president will surely find himself or herself at least as stymied by this dysfunction as President Obama, as will the people the political system supposedly serves, who must feel they have been subjected to a psychological experiment gone horribly wrong, pressing the red button in 2004 and getting a zap, pressing blue in 2008 for another zap, and now agonizing whether there is any choice that won’t zap them again in 2012. Yet in the interests of avoiding false evenhandedness, it must be admitted: The party with a stronger charge on its zapper right now, the party struggling with more self-imposed obstacles to responsible governance, the party most in need of a course correction, is the Republican Party.
David Frum, When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?, N.Y. Mag., Nov. 21, 2011, http://nymag.com/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/index4.html.
See Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein, The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How To Get It Back on Track 141-224 (2006).
David A. Fahrenthold, Lori Montgomery & Paul Kane, In Debt Deal, Triumph of the Old Washington, Wash. Post, Aug. 3, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-debt-deal-the-triumph-of-the-old-washington/2011/08/02/gIQARSFfqI_story_1.html.
See Ezra Klein, McConnell: “The Debt Ceiling Will Not Be Clean Anymore,” Wash. Post: Wonkblog (Aug. 2, 2011, 4:31 PM), http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/mcconnell-the-debt-ceiling-will-not-be-clean-anymore/2011/07/11/gIQAEXDDqI_blog.html.
For example, Ewing and Kysar state that a judicial dissent is a “prod” because it “forces confrontation,” Ewing & Kysar, supra note 4, at 366, an assertion that I find puzzling. See U.S. R.R. Ret. Bd. v. Fritz, 449 U.S. 166, 176 n.10 (1980), available at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12776259632629956565 (“The comments in the dissenting opinion about the . . . equal protection rational-basis standard . . . are just that: comments in a dissenting opinion.”). Similarly, I cannot understand why Ewing and Kysar suggest that the House of Representatives’ vote to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act should be seen as a “prod.” Ewing & Kysar, supra note 4, at 362 n.33. After all, the House bill was dead on arrival in the Senate, which had no incentive to consider it.
See, e.g., David M. Herszenhorn, Senate Rejects Repeal of Health Care Law, N.Y. Times, Feb. 2, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/health/policy/03congress.html (noting the Democrats’ confidence that they would easily defeat the amendment).
549 U.S. 497, 534-35 (2007), available at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=16923241216495494762.
See Felicity Barringer, White House Refused To Open Pollutants E-Mail, N.Y. Times, June 25, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/washington/25epa.html. Strictly speaking, of course, the EPA’s e-mail represented more than a plea, because it responded to a binding court order. But that simply strengthens the point: if the administration will ignore an e-mail that carries legal force, then why would it respond to a mere plea?
Because I reach this conclusion, I believe that Ewing and Kysar’s focus on reaching the merits in cases is tangential to the task at hand. Ewing and Kysar suggest that if a court reaches the merits, a dissent could function as a plea to policymakers. Since I do not see pleas as forming an effective governing tool, reaching the merits would only make sense as a prod. But the argument from prodding is not an argument for reaching the merits: it is an argument for using a prod. Reaching the merits per se will not be useful—only ruling in a way that prods the political branches will be.
I take this phrase from Henry M. Hart, Jr. & Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in the Making and Application of Law 143 (William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Philip P. Frickey eds. 1994)(tentative ed. 1958).
This quote is almost certainly apocryphal. While many will recognize it from Robert de Niro’s portrayal of Capone in The Untouchables (Paramount Pictures 1987), there is no interview, newspaper story, or magazine article that can properly verify if Capone, in fact, said it. Notably, it was described as “probably spurious” in Mark Levell & Bill Helmer, The Quotable Al Capone 3 (1990). Whether David Mamet, the screenplay writer for The Untouchables, made it up or Capone actually said it, Capone is now clearly associated with this quotation.
Cf. Alexander M. Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics 16 (2d ed. 1986), available at http://books.google.com/books?id=eEoyK7ZCXjsC. Critics might quickly note that such a position is too cynical by half: after loudly complaining that Congress is dysfunctional, I then deny any counter-majoritarian problems by sweetly suggesting that Congress override the judiciary if judges make a “mistake.” I plead guilty, but with an affirmative defense. Perhaps it is disingenuous to suggest that Congress override the judges, but if the critic believes it is disingenuous, then she must acknowledge that Congress is broken, so no branch has very good democratic bona fides. And if Congress cannot respond to the people’s will, then why should it be deferred to in the first place?
John Rennie, House Repubs Vote that Earth Is Not Warming, Sci. Am. (Mar. 16, 2011), http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=house-repubs-vote-that-earth-is-not-11-03-16.
One could deny the very existence of this problem by arguing that the judiciary should simply prod when it wants to; in other words, it constitutes a political branch as much as the legislature and the executive do. I do not read Ewing and Kysar as making this argument. Rather, I interpret them as arguing that the judiciary should use its unique function as the creator of common law to prod the political branches. Put another way, they contend that although the judiciary plays a political role in the constitutional system, it is not a political actor—at least not in the same way as Congress and the President. Although one could make the more radical argument, it is beyond the scope of this Essay.
These categories have ample vagueness and will need to be fleshed out. But this is true of all legal standards, whether we are speaking of “due process,” “arbitrary and capricious,” “directly related,” or many others. My proposed standards are not perfect. They are a start.
Although Ewing and Kysar’s framework conceivably can be applied to any interbranch prodding, their focus on climate change nuisance litigation obviously highlights their advocacy of courts using prods to push the political branches.
Under Senate rules, a measure is ordinarily approved by simple majority, but under Rule XXII, debate cannot be cut off without sixty senators voting to do so. Standing Rules of the Senate, S. Doc. No. 106-1, R. XXII, at 21 (2000), available at http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/SMAN-106/pdf/SMAN-106.pdf. Thus, for practical purposes, a measure must have sixty votes in order to be enacted, because unless it has sixty votes, it cannot come to a vote in the first place. In contemporary parlance, forty-one or more senators’ refusal to halt debate on a matter, thus preventing it from coming to a vote, is referred to as a filibuster. This Essay uses that terminology. See Filibuster and Cloture, U.S. Senate, http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Filibuster_Cloture.htm (last visited Feb. 14, 2012).
See Barbara Sinclair, The New World of U.S. Senators, in Congress Reconsidered 1, 7 (Lawrence C. Dodd & Bruce I. Oppenheimer eds., 2009). One should not exclusively blame Republicans for the filibuster morass: when the Democrats were in the minority during the first half of the 1980s, filibusters became more common. Still, the biggest jumps in the use of the filibuster came during Republican minorities: the early 1970s, the early 1990s, and the massive jump at the beginning of the 110th Congress. Mitch McConnell’s leadership of Senate Republicans has seen the obliteration of previous records of cloture votes, nearly doubling any previous four-year total. See Senate Action on Cloture Motions, U.S. Senate, http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/cloture_motions/clotureCounts.htm (last visited Feb. 14, 2012).
See, e.g., Catherine Fisk & Erwin Chemerinsky, The Filibuster, 49 Stan. L. Rev. 181, 253 (1997), available at http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1682&context=faculty_scholarship (arguing that the filibuster is constitutional but its entrenchment in Senate Rules is not); Michael J. Gerhardt, The Constitutionality of the Filibuster, 21 Const. Comment. 445, 482 (2004), available at http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1887&context=facpubs (arguing that both the filibuster and its entrenchment are constitutional).
See, e.g., John O. McGinnis & Michael B. Rappaport, The Judicial Filibuster, The Median Senator, and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty, 2005 Sup. Ct. Rev. 257, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=895605; Brent Wible, Filibuster vs. Supermajority Rule: From Polarization to a Consensus- and Moderation-Forcing Mechanism for Judicial Confirmations, 13 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 923 (2005), available at http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1228&context=wmborj.
Consider the familiar problem of the counter-majoritarian difficulty. Dozens of legal scholars have wrung their hands over the supposed problem of an unelected judiciary taking policy matters into its own hands—at times overturning the decisions of democratically elected legislatures. Yet none has seen fit to ask how the judiciary might function to enhance majoritarianism in light of the filibuster. One central irony of postwar American legal thought is that many civil rights bills passed the House, received presidential support, and attracted majority backing in the Senate, and none of the scholars castigating the Supreme Court for Brown seemed worried about the repeated Southern filibusters that brought school segregation into the courts in the first place. See Martin B. Gold & Dimple Gupta, The Constitutional Option To Change Senate Rules and Procedures: A Majoritarian Means To Over Come the Filibuster, 28 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 205, 208-09 (2004), available at http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Gold_Gupta_JLPP_article.pdf (noting that by 1959, “over a dozen civil rights bills had been defeated by filibusters”).
It is “good but not perfect” for an obvious reason: none of the major Senate climate bills actually came to a cloture vote, depriving this framework of its clarity. If the filibuster prod becomes more established, however, future Senate majority leaders could take care to put the filibuster on the record.
See Ryan Lizza, As the World Burns, New Yorker, Oct. 11, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_lizza.
See, e.g., E.J. Dionne Jr., Assault on the Media, Wash. Post, May 27, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/26/AR2005052601538.html (“Conservative academics have long attacked ‘postmodernist’ philosophies for questioning whether ‘truth’ exists at all and claiming that what we take as ‘truths’ are merely ‘narratives’ woven around some ideological predisposition. Today’s conservative activists have become the new postmodernists. They shift attention away from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations—and move the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media organizations putting them forward.”).
See Joshua Micah Marshall, The Post-Modern President, Wash. Monthly, Sept. 2003, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0309.marshall.html.
See Ron Suskind, Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush, N.Y. Times Mag., Oct. 17, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html. For more recent examples of the Republican Party’s embrace of postmodernism, see Jonathan Chait, Luntz, Meet Foucault, New Republic (Feb. 3, 2010, 10:10 AM), http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/luntz-meet-focault; and Jonathan Chait, Mitt Romney’s Potemkin Village, N.Y. Mag.: Daily Intel (Dec. 5, 2011, 12:41 PM), http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/12/mitt-romneys-potemkin-village.html.
The links between reasoned decisionmaking and science are straightforward enough that they seem obvious even to conservative commentators. See, e.g., Kathleen Parker, Rick Perry, The Republicans’ Messiah?, Wash. Post, Aug. 26, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rick-perry-the-republicans-messiah/2011/08/26/gIQAGnY5gJ_story.html (“[Perry’s] dog whistles to the congregation: He’s not sure anyone knows how old Earth is, evolution is just a ‘theory’ and global warming isn’t man-made. That we are yet again debating evolutionary theory and Earth’s origins—and that candidates now have to declare where they stand on established science—should be a signal that we are slip-sliding toward governance by emotion rather than reason.”).
The best text analyzing Langdellian legal science is Thomas C. Grey, Langdell’s Orthodoxy, 45 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 1 (1983).
Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharm., Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), available at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=827109112258472814.
1. Empirically tested: the theory or technique must be falsifiable, refutable, and testable.
2. Subjected to publication in a peer reviewed journal.
3. Evaluated against known or potential rate of error.
4. Employed with standards and controls concerning their operation.
5. Generally accepted by a relevant scientific community.
Cf. Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706 (2006), available at http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2010-title5/pdf/USCODE-2010-title5-partI-chap7-sec706.pdf (“The reviewing court shall . . . hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions found to be . . . arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law . . . .”).
At this stage, I remain agnostic about what judges should do if merely a strong preponderance of scientific evidence appears on one side of a policy debate but that evidence falls something short of a clear consensus. Perhaps the best approach would be to use a sliding scale: judges should be more inclined to prod to the extent that scientific evidence is imbalanced.
Congressional Insiders Poll, Nat’l J., Feb. 3, 2007, http://syndication.nationaljournal.com/images/203Insiderspoll_NJlogo.pdf. This is not restricted to climate change, but rather to most scientific endeavors. See generally Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (2005); Bruce Bartlett, Newt Gingrich and the Destruction of Congressional Expertise, N.Y. Times: Economix (Nov. 29, 2011, 6:00 AM) http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/gingrich-and-the-destruction-of-congressional-expertise (“Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories. . . . Unfortunately, Gingrichism lives on. Republican Congressional leaders continually criticize every Congressional agency that stands in their way. In addition to the C.B.O., one often hears attacks on the Congressional Research Service, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Government Accountability Office.”).
See generally Richard Elliot Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet 65-67 (enlarged ed. 1998) (detailing the Reagan Administration’s efforts to phase out chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting substances); Nathanial Gronewold, Montreal Protocol Eyed as Weapon in Fight Against Climate Change, N.Y. Times, July 21, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/07/21/21greenwire-montreal-protocol-eyed-as-weapon-in-fight-agai-58237.html (“Widely regarded as the most successful environmental treaty of all time, the Montreal Protocol is credited with eliminating 97 percent of gases used in refrigerant and cooling systems that were eating away at the atmospheric layer that protects life from harmful ultraviolet radiation.”).
United States v. Carolene Prods. Co., 304 U.S. 144, 152 n.4 (1938), available at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1808251577400430843.
See Bruce A. Ackerman, Beyond Carolene Products, 98 Harv. L. Rev. 713, 718 (1985), available at http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1147&context=fss_papers.
See Cass R. Sunstein, Interpreting Statutes in the Regulatory State, 103 Harv. L. Rev 405, 472-73 (1989). These canons are “substantive” in that they advance certain substantive policy goals; many traditional canons are simply linguistic guides to interpretation without any necessary substantive content. For example, the traditional canon of expressio unius exclusio alterius (i.e., the express mention of one thing excludes others) does not advance or hinder particular substantive legislative goals.
Sunstein did address the problem of the poor when he advocated for “welfare rights” as a canon of construction. Id. at 473-74. But he offered no process justification for this canon, arguing instead (unpersuasively, in my view) that such rights represent constitutional norms and that welfare rights and attention to disadvantaged groups are implicit in previous judicial statutory interpretation decisions. See William N. Eskridge, Jr., Philip P. Frickey & Elizabeth Garrett, Cases and Materials on Legislation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy 949 (4th ed. 2007) (finding that many of Sunstein’s substantive canons enjoy “no explicit support, and implied rejection in recent cases”). In any event, recognizing “welfare rights” is not the same as construing statutes to the benefit of poor people.
See, e.g., James M. Buchanan & Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962); Frank H. Easterbrook, The Supreme Court, 1983 Term—Foreword: The Court and the Economic System, 98 Harv. L. Rev. 4 (1984); George J. Stigler, The Theory of Economic Regulation, 2 Bell J. of Econ. & Mgmt. Sci. 3 (1971).
908 F.2d 1312 (7th Cir. 1990) (en banc), available at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10071397890963140087.
21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(B)(v) (2006), available at http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2008-title21/pdf/USCODE-2008-title21-chap13-subchapI-partD-sec841.pdf.
Marshall, 908 F.2d at 1330 (Cummings, J., dissenting), available at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10071397890963140087.
Daniel A. Farber, Do Theories of Statutory Interpretation Matter? A Case Study, 94 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1409, 1429 (2000), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=186135.
Ewing & Kysar, supra note 4, at 409 (quoting Roderick M. Hills, Jr., Against Preemption: How Federalism Can Improve the National Legislative Process, 82 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1, 28 (2007)), available at http://www.law.nyu.edu/idcplg?IdcService=GET_FILE&dDocName=ECM_DLV_015170&RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased.
Cf. William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1920), in Selected Poems and Four Plays of William Butler Yeats 89, 90 (M.L. Rosenthal ed., 4th ed. 1996).

References: v. 
 § 821
 v. 
 v. 
 § 706
 v. 
 § 841