Press Releases

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Prepared Remarks for the Judicial Conference
March 11, 2025

I know a great story about Oliver Wendell Holmes. I’m not sure if it’s true but I heard it from a friend who’s a federal judge and I thought if anybody might know whether it is true or apocryphal, it would be Chief Justice Roberts. So here goes:

Justice Holmes boarded the train in Washington Union Station. When the conductor came down the aisle, the famously absent-minded Justice could not locate his ticket anywhere: in his overcoat, his pockets, his wallet.  But the conductor, recognizing him, said “Justice Holmes, please don’t worry about it. You ride all the time and we know you’re good for it. It’s an honor to have you on the train.”  

But Holmes replied: “Dear man, you seem to think the issue is ‘where is my ticket?’ The issue, in fact, is ‘where am I going?’”

So where are we going, dear Members of the Judicial Conference?

In our honorable field of law and justice, we have a particular duty to respond to what Tom Paine might have called The American Crisis. These are the times that try our souls. Every day a new legal or constitutional boundary is trespassed. Congressional statutes and spending appropriations are being ignored, prosecutors are being summarily fired for doing their job and upholding the law. Law firms are being punished for representing clients those in power disapprove of and law students are being deprived of opportunities in public service because of the religiously-based inclusion policies of their private law schools. Our nation’s anti-corruption apparatus is being dismantled: 18 Inspectors General have been sacked, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which for 50 years has been one of our nation’s key tools for exporting the rule of law, is no longer being enforced, and an agency tasked with protecting consumers from fraudulent and deceitful practices of the financial industry has been unilaterally shuttered. Children born in America are being stripped of their constitutional right to citizenship by executive fiat. Lawful permanent residents are being arrested and threatened with deportation for having the wrong political opinion, while news organizations, peaceful protesters, and members of Congress are being threatened with prosecution for criticizing the Administration.

In this grim environment, I want to say to the judiciary that our very existence as a democratic nation depends on your courage to defend the Constitution and the rule of law. 

I will invoke just one Supreme Court decision to illustrate what I mean. 

I refer to the Steel Seizure case, Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, in 1952. The case is famous in the American canon because it demonstrates, more vividly even than Marbury v. Madison, the supremacy of Article III courts, and the Supreme Court specifically, over constitutional violations by the Executive branch. It is a case that has also stood the test of time because of its emphatic assertion that all of the president’s powers are rooted only in the Constitution or in explicit Congressional action and delegation. When the President acts with explicit or implied Congressional authorization, “his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate.”

But without a constitutional grant of power or Congressional direction, the President’s power is at its lowest ebb; if he acts contrary to Congressional purpose, he loses. Even in the midst of the Korean war and with a public clamor for him to seize the steel plants to keep the war machine humming, Truman lost in the Supreme Court, 6-3. He had no power to seize the steel plants, something only the Congress could do, especially because it considered doing that and had refused.  In her confirmation hearings, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett rightly called this “the accepted framework for evaluating executive action” in the Supreme Court.

But here is the remarkable thing. All nine Justices on the Court at the time were appointed by Democratic presidents, with four of the nine named to the Court by President Harry Truman himself. Justice Hugo Black, who wrote the decision, had been named to the Court by President Roosevelt as a New Dealer and served alongside Truman in the U.S. Senate as his colleague. The 6-justice majority thwarting Truman’s plan to seize the steel factories to settle a labor strike were fellow New Deal liberals: 

Justice Black, Justice Douglas, Justice Jackson—who had been FDR’s Solicitor General and then Attorney General, Justice Burton, and Justice Clark (a Truman appointee who had also been Truman’s Attorney General). Even the District Court judge, David Pine, who first issued an injunction against the Administration  had been Roosevelt’s U.S. Attorney in D.C. He ruled against the government based on the answer to a pivotal question: “So when the sovereign people adopted the Constitution, it enumerated the powers set up in the Constitution but limited the powers of the Congress and limited the powers of the judiciary, but it did not limit the powers of the Executive. Is that what you say?”

In the oral presentation of his dissent at the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Vinson went out of his way to make a sarcastic aside that Justices Jackson and Clark decided the constitutional issue directly contrary to the policy positions they had taken when they were the Attorneys General for FDR and Truman.  

But the Steel Seizure majority were Justices acting according to their oath to interpret the Constitution, no longer acting as partisans to advocate their clients’ political positions. Far from being hypocrites or turncoats, they earned their title of “Justice” that day because they demonstrated their overriding loyalty to the Constitution and not to their political party, much less a single man.

It took real character and real guts for the Justices in the Majority to decide such a momentous constitutional issue against the President who nominated them to the Court, and against the political policy they had supported all their lives before going on the Court.

President Truman was stunned by the decision, which he continued to attack years later in his Memoirs. Justice Black was concerned enough that Truman would take the decision personally that he invited Truman and his fellow Justices to a party at his home. Truman, still smarting from the defeat, told Black, “Hugo, I don't care much for your law, but, by golly, this bourbon is good.”

“Always take the view from eternity,” Spinoza said. 

These justices were not swayed by the politics of the moment or the party loyalties that they renounced when they took the bench. They took the view from eternity. 

Emerson once wrote: “The voyage of the best ship is a zig-zag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain your other genuine actions.”

I wish you Godspeed and good fortune in all of your work.