U.S. GOVERNMENT | A resilient balance of institutions
31 December 2007
The Courts
The Constitution gives the Supreme Court and lower federal courts considerable independence. Once approved by the Senate, judges can hold office for life unless impeached and convicted for some serious crime, protecting them from any president who might not like their decisions. Salaries of judges cannot be reduced, protecting them from pressure from Congress.
The Constitution established the Supreme Court and authorized Congress to establish lower courts. Congress has created federal appeals courts, district courts, bankruptcy courts, courts of federal claims, a tax court, a court of international trade and other federal courts.
The Supreme Court's nine justices make up the final court of appeal from the lower federal and state courts.
The judicial branch interprets the Constitution. It can declare legislation or presidential actions unconstitutional, but the Constitution does not explicitly give the courts such power. What it says is "The judicial power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution ...."
In a landmark 1803 case, Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshal's opinion established the Supreme Court's authority to declare acts of Congress, and by implication acts of the president, unconstitutional if they exceeded the powers granted by the Constitution.
But even more important, the Court became the arbiter of the Constitution, the final authority on what the document meant. As such, the Supreme Court became in fact as well as in theory an equal partner in government, and it has played that role ever since.
In the 1810 case Fletcher v. Peck, the Supreme Court asserted its power to overturn a state law.
Another landmark case, McCulloch v. Maryland, in 1819, upheld a broad interpretation of the federal government's powers under the Constitution and paved the way for the modern national state that would emerge after the Civil War.
In that case, Marshal's court ruled that the federal government's creation of a central bank, nowhere authorized specifically in the Constitution, nevertheless was constitutional because Article 1 gave Congress the power "to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper" for executing the federal government's specified powers.
Sometimes the Supreme Court overturns prior Supreme Court decisions. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the justices ruled that "separate but equal" schools for white and black children was constitutional. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the justices ruled 9-0 that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. That decision propelled the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Controversies over Supreme Court decisions can persist for generations. More than 35 years since the court ruled in Roe v. Wade in favor of a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, a political struggle over overturning that decision continues to divide the United States.
