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The Legacy of President Obama in the U.S. Supreme Court

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Looking Back on President Barack Obama’s Legacy

Abstract

Isaac Unah and Ryan Williams evaluate the Obama administration and its relations with the US Supreme Court. With the advice and consent of the US Senate, President Obama appointed two justices for the Supreme Court and several lower federal court judges. This chapter examined Obama’s legacy in the Supreme Court and the critical cases (e.g., campaign finance, health care, voting rights, same-sex marriage) that faced the Roberts Court. They argue that Obama’s presidency was transformative for the institution and politics of the Court. President Obama experienced both successes and failures in attempting to shape the Court in his own image, but he largely succeeded in using the Supreme Court to secure some of his biggest victories as president. At the end of the tenure, Obama was only partially successful in slowing down the aggressive rightward shift of the Court. Obama’s two relatively liberal/progressive-minded appointees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are a counterweight to the current Court’s conservative majority. With the help of Sotomayor and Kagan, the liberal minority has slowed the Court from moving dramatically to the Right. The chapter makes that conclusion after examining the voting behavior of the Obama appointed justices compared to the justices they replaced on the Bench.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, Unemployment in December 2008 on the Internet at https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2009/jan/wk2/art02.htm (visited May 21, 2018).

  2. 2.

    Barack Obama: “Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention,” July 27, 2004. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751-2004Jul27.html

  3. 3.

    Justice Thurgood Marshall’s dissent in Rodriquez echoes Obama’s sentiments about the harshness of the Court’s decision:

    The majority’s holding can only be seen as a retreat from our historic commitment to equality of educational opportunity. In my judgment, the right of every American to an equal start in life, so far as the provision of a state service as important as education is concerned, is far too vital to permit state discrimination of this sort. (San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez 1973)

  4. 4.

    Republicans controlled the House of Representatives for the final six years of Obama’s presidency and gained majority control of the Senate following the 2014 midterm elections.

  5. 5.

    Information obtained from http://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/judicial-vacancies/archive-judicial-vacancies

  6. 6.

    The blue slip process is an institutional norm used by the Senate Judiciary Committee to solicit the preferences of a senator when a lower court federal judge is nominated in that senator’s home state. Traditionally, if a home state senator did not return her blue slip signaling her support of the nominee, the nominee was not considered and the nomination was essentially dead. See Slotnick et al. (2017) and Binder and Maltzman (2009).

  7. 7.

    Numbers derived from Slotnick et al. (2017).

  8. 8.

    President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address, January 28, 2014. Online by White House Office of the Press Secretary. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/28/president-barack-obamas-state-union-address

  9. 9.

    https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/the-n-r-a-at-the-bench/

  10. 10.

    The Biden Rule is strikingly like the Thurmond Rule, named after former Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Strom Thurmond. Although not a formal rule of the Senate, it is often invoked by senators who wish to deny presidential appointments to federal courts in the months preceding a presidential election (Binder 2012).

  11. 11.

    Note that when Senator Joe Biden made his speech, there was no vacancy on the Court and no nominee was under consideration by the Senate.

  12. 12.

    For an extended discussion of the history of the nuclear option, see Smith (2014).

  13. 13.

    Souter was appointed by George Bush to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice William Brennan.

  14. 14.

    Based on a two-sample test of proportions conducted using Stata 13. The p-value is 0.015.

  15. 15.

    Spaeth identified 14 total issue areas but only 11 had sufficient cases to permit analysis.

  16. 16.

    See “A Conversation with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan” Harvard Law School, September 16, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxITcqE0orM

  17. 17.

    As the newest member of the Court, Justice Kagan heads the Cafeteria Committee. At a speech at Harvard Law School, she spoke about being thanked profusely by law clerks for introducing a yogurt machine to the Court. She apparently also improved the quality of the coffee (ibid).

  18. 18.

    The percentages pertaining to opinion writing are based on 12 issue areas of the Court’s docket.

  19. 19.

    For example, Ponnuru (2012) wrote that Roberts “acted less like a judge than like a politician, and a slippery one.”

  20. 20.

    Baehr v. Lewin 852 P.2d 44 (Haw. 1993), Baehr v. Miike 910 P.2d 112 (Haw. 1996).

  21. 21.

    Pub. L. No. 104-199, 110 Stat. 2419 (1996) (codified at 1 U.S.C. § 7 (2006); 28 U.S.C. § 1738C (2006)).

  22. 22.

    See Letter from Eric H. Holder, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, to Hon. John H. Boehner, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives (Feb. 23, 2011) available at http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/February/11-ag-223.html

  23. 23.

    See Attorney General Letter: “I have informed Members of Congress of this decision, so Members who wish to defend the statute may pursue that option.” https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/statement-attorney-general-litigation-involving-defense-marriage-act

  24. 24.

    Moreover, the administration’s argument that there was no reasonable defense of DOMA’s constitutionality was met with skepticism given that the federal government had recently been defending the law in federal court (Tipler 2013).

  25. 25.

    Moore v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. of Educ., 402 U.S. 47, 48 (1971) (per curiam); see also Muskrat v. United States, 219 U.S. 346, 361 (1911).

  26. 26.

    Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387 (2012).

  27. 27.

    In its 2009–2013 terms, the Supreme Court issued thirteen decisions on the merits concerning various aspects of immigration law (Johnson 2015). The Roberts Court considered issues of federal versus state authority, executive power, and the extension of civil rights to non-resident aliens. See Padilla v. Kentucky, 559 U.S. 356 (2010).

  28. 28.

    See Moncrieffe v. Holder (2013), Vartelas v. Holder (2012), Carachuri-Rosendo v. Holder (2010), Mellouli v. Lynch (2015).

  29. 29.

    See Martinez v. Regents of the University of California (2010). See also Rosenbloom (2013)

  30. 30.

    See Chae Chan Ping v. United States (The Chinese Exclusion Case), 130 U.S. 581 (1889).

  31. 31.

    Mathews v. Diaz et al., 426 U.S. 67, 81 (1976).

  32. 32.

    Randal C. Archibald, Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration, New York Times (April 24, 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/politics/24immig.html?_r=0

  33. 33.

    The Court had previously addressed this issue in Hines v. Davidowitz 312 U.S. 52 (1941).

  34. 34.

    In re Aiken County, 725 F.3d 255, 264 (D.C. Cir. 2013).

  35. 35.

    Kris W. Kobach, “The ‘DREAM’ Order Isn’t Legal,” New York Post, June 22, 2012.

  36. 36.

    See Lozano v. City of Hazleton, 724 F.3d 297, 300 (3d Cir. 2013), Villas at Parkside Partners v. City of Farmers Branch, 726 F.3d 524 (5th Cir. 2013) (en banc), Valle del Sol, Inc. v. Whiting 134 S. Ct. 1876 (2014), and Keller v. City of Fremont.

  37. 37.

    President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address (January 27, 2010) (transcript available at http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/5706).

  38. 38.

    Transcript of the Second Debate, New York Times (October 10, 2016).

  39. 39.

    Source: SCOTUSblog Stat Pack: http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/SB_agreement-tables_20170628.pdf

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Isaac Unah & Ryan Williams

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    Wilbur C. Rich

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Unah, I., Williams, R. (2019). The Legacy of President Obama in the U.S. Supreme Court. In: Rich, W. (eds) Looking Back on President Barack Obama’s Legacy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01545-9_8

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