By Michael F. Duggan
“Young man, about seventy-five years ago I learned that I was not God. And so, when the people… want to do something and I can’t find anything in the Constitution expressly forbidding them to do it, I say, whether or not I like it, ‘Goddamn it, let ’em do it.'”
-Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr.
Reduced to its constituent elements, the law consists of the rule (statutes, regulations, executive orders, and the holdings of case law), general compliance with the rule by a majority of people, and enforcement against those who do not comply with it. If any of these elements is missing, the law, as a practical matter, ceases to exist. And the law is fundamentally a practical matter. When it becomes impractical, it becomes dry fiction.
The cornerstone of legal realism is that although the law and morality are not identical—the law is a set of external rules where morality consists of the feelings of right and wrong that rise up in us—law must exist in proximity to a nation’s normative morality and must reflect this in its spirit. It must reflect a majority ethos. As Holmes put it in “The Path of the Law,” “The law is the witness and deposit of our moral life.” In The Common Law, he writes “The first responsibility of a sound body of law is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.” When it comes to federal case law regarding fundamental rights, the “community” is the entire country (“fundamental” translates to “universal” within a nation). You do not throw questions on fundamental rights back to the states. That’s how we got Jim Crow.
Because of this, the Ninth Amendment provision securing other rights “retained by the people,” far from being the “inkblot” characterized by Robert Bork, would seem to be an interpretive cornerstone of the Constitution. If a historical tradition or a longstanding precedent can be shown—for example, a case law precedent upholding an unenumerated fundamental right for almost a half-century that is embraced by a majority of people in the country—it seems reasonable that that right is protected under the Ninth Amendment.
Federal judges are not elected, they are nominated and confirmed via a constitutionally-prescribed process. The idea is to keep decisions removed from the passions and prejudices of the people by a degree of separation while maintaining its proximity to the dominant, normative morality. Judges and justices are drawn from the people, after all. The idea is that fundamental rights should be beyond the feelings of the moment and should not be put to popular votes (this is a reason why the Framers thought it necessary to enshrine some rights in a Bill of Rights). So there it is: constitutional fine-tuning to preserve a normative basis for law, but no popular referendums to get rid of fundamental rights.
But what would happen in a deeply-divided nation where jurists are nominated by presidents and confirmed or opposed by members of legislative bodies controlled by strongly ideological political parties specifically because of the candidate’s ideological prejudices and fervor? Article II of the Constitution says that the Senate shall give “advice and consent” in regard to nominations. It does not say that political operatives and ideological extremists elected to the Congress may obstruct, delay, or even fail to entertain the nomination of a qualified judicial candidate for political or ideological reasons until more politically favorable circumstances present themselves.
If the Senate Judiciary Committee does not, for example, entertain the nomination of a qualified candidate put forth by a two-term president for 293 days, allowing a subsequent president to fill that slot because of overt political obstruction, can we say that the confirmed candidate is constitutionally legitimate? If the same political party that obstructed the first candidate reverses its position and rushes through the confirmation of a one-term president who was not elected by a popular majority and is now facing imminent defeat in a looming general election, can we call that candidate’s confirmation to be legitimate?
If these two jurists then side with a ruling that goes squarely against a half-century of precedent regarding a fundamental right—a precedent upheld in decisions of that court and embraced by a majority of American citizens—how can we say that the new precedent has normative legitimacy?
The tightrope that a healthy republic must walk is to implement the will of the majority while protecting the rights of political minorities. We can only speculate on the unhappy fate of a system that inverts this, where political minorities trample the fundamental rights embraced by the majority. The situation would seem to make the divisions in this country deeper and wider than ever and perhaps beyond repair. IT would seem to make a constitutional crises inevitable somewhere down the road.