When Courts and Congress Collide: The Struggle for Control of America's Judicial System - Hardcover

Court-directed animus has come and gone with some regularity since the founding of the republic, from the time the Jeffersonian Republican Congress attempted to undo what it saw as the outgoing Federalists' damage, to Roosevelt's efforts to pack the Supreme Court to protect the New Deal. As Charles Geyh points out, the battle over appointments is often a fruitless struggle, since judges are free to ignore the circumstances once they accept a seat on the bench. In Geyh's view, Congress would actually have better luck controlling the courts through a variety of other means: impeaching uncooperative judges, eliminating or gerrymandering their jurisdictions, stripping them of oversight powers, or slashing their budgets. Legislators have long used such tactics to bring wayward appointees from other branches to heel. Yet, while the nomination process has often been bitter and partisan, no federal judge has ever been impeached on the basis of his or her decisions. The explanation for this incongruity, Geyh suggests, is not a simple Constitutional balance of powers, but a "dynamic equilibrium": a constant give-and-take between Congressional efforts to control the judiciary on the one hand, and historical norms of judicial independence on the other.

Charles Geyh is Professor of Law and Harry T. Ice Faculty Fellow at Indiana University. He has served as director of the American Judicature Society's Center for Judicial Independence, reporter to American Bar Association commissions on judicial independence and public financing of judicial elections, and counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the U. S. House of Representatives.