American Politicians Confront the Court Opposition Politics and Changing Responses to Judicial Power
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AND ELECTED-BRANCH RELATIONS WITH THE JUDICIARY
- PART II HOSTILITY TO JUDICIAL AUTHORITY AND THE POLITICAL IDIOM OF CIVIC REPUBLICANISM
- 3 In Support of Unified Governance
- 4 Party against Partisanship
- 5 “As Party Exigencies Require”
- PART III HARNESSING JUDICIAL POWER AND THE POLITICAL IDIOM OF LIBERAL PLURALISM
- On the Return of Opposition Illegitimacy and the Prospects for New Development
- Index
- References
5 - “As Party Exigencies Require”
Republicanism, Loyal Opposition, and the Emerging Legitimacy of Multiple Constitutional Visions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AND ELECTED-BRANCH RELATIONS WITH THE JUDICIARY
- PART II HOSTILITY TO JUDICIAL AUTHORITY AND THE POLITICAL IDIOM OF CIVIC REPUBLICANISM
- 3 In Support of Unified Governance
- 4 Party against Partisanship
- 5 “As Party Exigencies Require”
- PART III HARNESSING JUDICIAL POWER AND THE POLITICAL IDIOM OF LIBERAL PLURALISM
- On the Return of Opposition Illegitimacy and the Prospects for New Development
- Index
- References
Summary
In contrast to Martin Van Buren's ideas about a disloyal aristocratic minority opposition and single-party constitutionalism, Abraham Lincoln, as the first Republican president and a consummate party politician, conceded the political opposition's right to rule and endorsed the idea that constitutional interpretations could legitimately vary. Lincoln's ideational innovation was compelled by the secession crisis, and it carried vast consequences for how future politicians would manipulate judicial power. Just as the Framers relocated the source of sovereignty from the legislature to the people in order to stem the crisis of governance created by the Articles of Confederation, and just as Van Buren altered the meaning of party from an institution inimical to civic health to one that promoted civil stability in an effort to end the “corruption” against which the Madisonian design proved ineffectual, Lincoln, seeking to prevent the complete breakup of the republic, would re-define the status of opposition and, with it, the notion of what counted as legitimate constitutional interpretation.
This chapter begins by detailing politicians' ideas about opposition and party during the 1850s and 1860s. The first section examines how early Republican leaders, especially William Seward, characterized Democrats in civic republican terms, that is, as an anti-constitutional conspiracy, and cast Republicans not just as competitors but also in the Van Burenite framework of a singular constitutional party replacement.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- American Politicians Confront the CourtOpposition Politics and Changing Responses to Judicial Power, pp. 170 - 222Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
References
, “The House that Abe Built: The ‘House Divided’ Speech and Republican Party Politics,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2 (Winter 1999), 625–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Originalism in American Law and Politics: A Constitutional History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 18, 20Google Scholar
, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post–Civil War America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 51Google Scholar
, The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005)Google Scholar
, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 1, 2Google Scholar
, Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, Frederic Bancroft, ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913), Vol. 1, 57Google Scholar
, “First Joint Debate at Ottawa,” 21 August 1858, in Political Debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1894), 95Google Scholar
, “Irrepressible Conflict Speech,” Rochester, NY, 25 October 1858, in History of U.S. Political Parties, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (New York: Chelsea House, 1973), Vol. 2, 1238Google Scholar
, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 29–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Making and Mobilizing the Republican Party, 1854–1860,” in The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans' First Generation, Robert Engs and Randall Miller, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 47–59Google Scholar
, The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 171Google Scholar
, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 27–8Google Scholar
, “The Curious History of Attempts to Suppress Antislavery Speech, Press, and Petition in 1835–37,” Northwestern University Law Review 89 (1995), 785–870Google Scholar
, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964)Google Scholar
, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 432Google Scholar
, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 177Google Scholar
, Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 34, 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, Robert W. Johannsen, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 292, 47Google Scholar
, The Shaping of American Liberalism: The Debates over Ratification, Nullification and Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), 117–35Google Scholar
, “Speech in Springfield, Illinois,” 26 June 1857. Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 2 vols. (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1989), 302–03Google Scholar
, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 185–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ed., The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866 (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1933), 553Google Scholar
, Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 83–5Google Scholar
, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 93–5Google Scholar
, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979)Google Scholar
, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971)Google Scholar
, Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969)Google Scholar
, The Transformation of American Politics, 1840–1860 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967)Google Scholar
, critiqued this assertion as “reductive” in his “The New Political History and the Coming of the Civil War,” Pacific History Review 54 (May 1985), 117–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Semi-Sovereign People (Chicago: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983 [1960]), 36–8, 71Google Scholar
, “The Crime against Sumner: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Rise of the Republican Party,” Civil War History 25 (September 1979), 218–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988),176–227Google Scholar
, “Constitutional Politics/Constitutional Law,” Yale Law Journal 99 (1989), 453–547, and his We the People: Transformations (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1998), 99–252CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997)Google Scholar
and , The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 118Google Scholar
and , “Andrew Johnson and the Politics of Failure” in Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making, Stephen Skowronek and Matthew Glassman, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)Google Scholar
and , Creating the Federal Judicial System, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Federal Judicial Center, 2005), 16–21Google Scholar
, , and , The Federal Judiciary and Institutional Change (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 37–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Dred Scott Decision in the Light of Contemporary Legal Doctrines,” American Historical Review 17 (October 1911), 52–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics (New York: Macmillan, 1898), and Reconstruction, Political, and Economic: 1865–1877 (New York: Harper's 1907)Google Scholar
, Reconstruction and the Constitution: 1866–1876 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)Google Scholar
, The Supreme Court of the United States, Its Foundation, Methods and Achievements: An Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928)Google Scholar
, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy: A Study of the Crisis in American Power Politics (New York: Vintage, 1960), 326Google Scholar
, “The Reconstruction of Federal Judicial Power, 1863–1875,” American Journal of Legal History 13 (October 1969), 333–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar