Politics today is characterized by a remarkable degree of hostility directed at the judiciary. Citizens from nearly every point on the political spectrum complain bitterly about the courts and perceived abuses of judicial power. It is hardly rare to hear educated people question judges’ motives, propose limits to judicial discretion, or demand that judges be somehow held more accountable to the will of the people.
Partisan fury fuels the anger. Discussing Bush v. Gore, one Democratic Senator accused “the most activist Supreme Court in history” of “installing” the current president. Following the death of Terri Schiavo, a Republican congressional leader darkly suggested that the judges who ordered her feeding tube removed would “have to answer for their behavior.” Here in Maryland, the recent gay marriage decision triggered an effort to impeach a circuit court judge.
It has even come to this: On Election Day, South Dakotans will vote on a proposed state amendment that would establish a special grand jury empowered to hand down fines and jail terms to judges for making decisions deemed abusive by the special grand jurors, who would be selected at random by the Secretary of State. You can read about the “grassroots” movement to pass the dangerous proposal on a Web site named after the sinister acronym for the “Judicial Accountability Initiative Law”: www.jail4judges.org.
While such anti-jurist vitriol may strike some of us as unique to these troubled times, history tells us that attacks against the judiciary are actually a perennial feature of our political culture. Thankfully, history also suggests that the independence of the judiciary has remained intact thanks to statesmen willing to rise above momentary grievances and recognize the value of judicial autonomy.
Justice Chase
An instructive example is the impeachment, trial, and acquittal of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Chase of Maryland at the start of the nineteenth century. The Chase crisis erupted in the midst of the fiercest partisan conflict the country would see until the Civil War.
Jeffersonian Republicans, many of whom had faced prosecution under the Alien and Sedition Acts during the presidency of John Adams, accused the Federalist Party of seeking to establish a monarchy. In turn, the Federalists countered that Republicans sought to make the U.S. a satellite of revolutionary France.
Following the landslide victories of Thomas Jefferson and his Republican Party in the 1800 elections, the defeated Federalists created dozens of new positions in the judiciary to preserve their control of that branch of the government, enraging the Republicans. A dispute over one of these positions eventually led to the case of Marbury v. Madison. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of President Jefferson in that case (at least with respect to the issue immediately at hand: whether Jefferson’s Secretary of State had to deliver a commission to the Federalist Marbury), Republican fury at the federal courts cooled somewhat, but did not completely dissipate.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase was a prominent target of Republican fury. In 1803, he delivered a charge to a grand jury in Baltimore. (The giving of charges was common at the time, employed by judges at the start of a circuit court session to refer to business before the court.) Chase used this charge to air his views on a variety of political issues, criticizing the movement to liberalize Maryland’s state constitution and denouncing President Jefferson’s removal of Federalists from office.
Outraged Republicans, who had been waiting for an opportunity to remove Federalist judges from the bench, seized on these comments and commenced impeachment proceedings in the House. The House voted to send eight Articles of Impeachment to the Senate. One related to Chase’s political statements. Others concerned Chase’s handling of the trials of John Fries, the leader of an armed tax revolt in Pennsylvania, and James Callendar, a Republican newspaperman accused of libel and known today mainly for exposing President Jefferson’s relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.
Chase’s fate rested in the hands of the Senate, then made up of 25 Jeffersonian Republicans and nine Federalists. If two-thirds of the senators voted to convict Chase on at least one of the eight Articles of Impeachment, he would be removed from the Supreme Court.
Chase appeared before the Senate on Jan. 4, 1805, and declared that he was being tried for his political convictions rather than for any real crime or misdemeanor.
Chase and his attorneys persuaded the Senate that Chase’s conduct did not justify his removal from office. With at least six Jeffersonian Republicans joining the nine Federalists who voted not guilty on each Article of Impeachment, the Senate on March 1, 1805, acquitted Chase on all counts. Though a majority voted guilty on three of the eight Articles, all the votes fell far short of the two-thirds required for conviction.
With the acquittal of Justice Chase, the Republican campaign to purge the federal judiciary ground to a halt. Never again would the House impeach a Supreme Court Justice. Although the motives of the six Republicans who voted to acquit on all counts were mixed, these statesmen were motivated at least partly by the conviction that the independence of the judiciary was vital to the health of the new country. They were willing to place this ideal above the more immediate concerns of ideology and party loyalty.
Foresight
In many ways the Chase trial presaged the battle over President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s court-packing plan 130 years later. In both cases the party controlling the two elected branches of government sought to control a judiciary they perceived to be an impediment to the democratic will. Both times these efforts were thwarted by members of the president’s own party who recognized the danger of such undue interference in the courts.
The Chase trial stands as a vital lesson for all of us today. It demonstrates that even when we may be justified in criticizing the judicial decisions, we should think long and hard about whether the immediate criticisms are serious enough to warrant compromising the independence of the judiciary. No individual can be satisfied with every decision a court issues, but every citizen should feel at the outset of a case that the cause will be heard by a neutral arbiter free from undue political pressure, thanks in part to those foresighted senators who voted to acquit the Honorable Samuel Chase.
In writing this article, the author relied in part on Jane Shaffer Elsmere’s definitive biography, Justice Samuel Chase (1980). He thanks for his assistance John J. Lovejoy, a law clerk at Shapiro Sher Guinot & Sandler.