Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court

by James Macgregor Burns

Overview

From renowned political theorist James MacGregor Burns, an incisive critique of the overreaching power of an ideological Supreme Court

For decades, Pulitzer Prize-winner James MacGregor Burns has been one of the great masters of the study of power and leadership in America. In Packing the Court, he turns his eye to the U.S. Supreme Court, an institution that he believes has become more powerful, and more partisan, than the founding fathers ever intended. In a compelling and provocative narrative, Burns reveals how the Supreme Court has served as a reactionary force in American politics at critical moments throughout the nation's history, and concludes with a bold proposal to rein in the court's power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143117414
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/29/2010
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	953,100
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

James MacGregor Burns is the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government Emeritus at Williams College and Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland. He is the author of more than two dozen books, including Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and Leadership, which is considered a seminal work in the field of leadership studies.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[Dietz's] tone and pacing make it easy to follow the constitutional arguments, and he pauses at crucial intervals to allow listeners to consider Burns's ideas." —-AudioFile

Editorial Reviews

Some of Mr. Burns’s proposals are bound to be controversial: for instance, he suggests near the end of the book that a president could challenge judicial authority by announcing "flatly that he or she would not accept the Supreme Court’s verdicts because the power of judicial emasculation of legislation was not - and never had been - in the Constitution." Happily for the reader, the bulk of this volume is less didactic, charting the fallout that "the passions of the day," in Justice Felix Frankfurter’s words, have had on its rulings, while analyzing the role that chance, timing and the mysteries of human personality have played in shaping the institution and its decisions.
—The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Burns's latest is a jeremiad against the influence and unelected power of the Supreme Court. Burns ably guides reader through a brief history of the court, concentrating on its instances of overreaching the bounds of its authority, condemning the unconstitutionality of judicial review and closing with a series of suggestions for reform that include more rigorous presidential oversight of Supreme Court rulings. Norman Dietz is as polished and assured as ever; he reads ably and clearly, eliding Burns's exasperation and laying out the facts with a minimum of inflection and understated authority. A Penguin Press hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 27). (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian claims that John Marshall got it spectacularly wrong: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the American people, not of the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court, to say what the Constitution is."The Supreme Court's power and authority date from 1803's Marbury v. Madison, which established it as the final arbiter of any conflict between the law and the Constitution. Burns (Leadership Scholar/Univ. of Maryland; Running Alone: Presidential Leadership from JFK to Bush II-Why It Has Failed and How We Can Fix It, 2006, etc.) departs from conventional wisdom and argues that Marbury's enshrinement of the judiciary's supremacy was actually an extra-Constitutional power grab by Chief Justice Marshall. Marbury immunized the court from checks and balances, made it unaccountable within our democracy and ensured deliberate efforts by the party in power to "pack" the court with its own partisans. In graceful prose, Burns takes us on a quick historical tour of many famous and infamous decisions, demonstrating how the court, frequently imagined as the protector of the weak and powerless, has more often been the friend of the powerful and a "a choke point for progressive reforms," contemptuous of popular legislation. He comments on previous, unavailing efforts to curb the Court's power-drives for impeachment, tinkering with the court's numbers, popular votes on recall of decisions or of the Justices themselves, or fiddling with the rules, such as requiring a supermajority to strike down federal legislation. Astonishingly, Burns then proposes that President Obama, in an act of transformational leadership, announce his refusal to accept Supreme Courtverdicts overruling vital legislation because the Constitution does not mention this power. Supporters of judicial supremacy, writes the author, should then be invited to amend the Constitution to explicitly provide for a power the court has never truly possessed. The author concedes the risk of this "open defiance of constitutional customs and the myths and mysteries that have long enshrouded the court . . . There might even be demands for impeachment." No kidding. Tendentious history in service of a reform bound to go nowhere. Author events in New York and Washington, D.C.

Kirkus Reviews

"[Dietz's] tone and pacing make it easy to follow the constitutional arguments, and he pauses at crucial intervals to allow listeners to consider Burns's ideas." —-AudioFile

From the Publisher