Jurisdiction stripping is back, this time from the left

Here’s something I wrote about federal judicial accountability:

Many commentators have praised Article III’s guarantees of life tenure and freedom from salary cuts as essential tools to preserve judicial independence. Far less frequently have the commentators explored the impact of these guarantees on judicial accountability. Rather, until relatively recently, the prevalent assumption (dating back to the original Federalist debates) has been that “the perceived need for judicial accountability to counterbalance life tenure, nonreducible salaries, and judicial review, began and ended with the impeachment mechanism.” A reexamination of that assumption, however, has been sparked in the early twenty-first century both by academic commentators and some in Congress. The last ten years alone have produced a host of creative— sometimes outrageous—alternatives to promote federal judicial accountability through (in most cases) a combination of executive and legislative power and populist sentiment. Some such proposals are effectively substance-neutral, most notably replacing life tenure with fixed, lengthy judicial terms. Other proposals, however, are aimed at the substance of judicial decision-making, among them several schemes to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to hear certain types of cases. Prominent politicians have even occasionally threatened impeachment—or worse—for federal judges as a punishment for decisions they did not find appropriate. Contributing to the tenor of politically “accountable” judges is a federal judicial appointment process that has become increasingly partisan in the last two decades.

This paragraph was part of the introduction to an article I co-wrote twelve years ago, and yet it feels surprisingly fresh. The difference is that while many of the efforts to subject the court to populism and political sentiment a decade ago came from conservatives, today those same views are being embraced by the liberal establishment. Countless bad ideas — Court packing, term limits, and the like — continue to emerge, with the most recent being the rediscovery of jurisdiction-stripping. Bloomberg Businessweek explains:

Some liberal proponents believe jurisdiction stripping could help Democrats shield bold future legislation from damaging court battles. In theory a Democratic Congress could pass a health-care plan or a Green New Deal with a provision stipulating that the legislation lies outside the bounds of Supreme Court review.

Under variations of the jurisdiction-stripping proposal, Democratic lawmakers could also limit the ability of lower courts to review legislation or could confine legal challenges to geographic regions where courts are generally sympathetic.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening. Today’s politicians, unable or unwilling to do the hard work of compromise and dealmaking, are leaving the courts to make sense of hastily written and sloppy laws. When lawmakers don’t like the results, they propose extreme “fixes” which would deny the courts the ability to do even their core adjudicative work. This is wrong, whether it comes from the right or the left, and is symptomatic of how awful our political class — and their academic enablers — have become.