Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States
VIII. The Postwar Period: Brown v. Board of Education and the Warren Court
The middle decades of the twentieth century witnessed revived debates about the role of the Court in American public life, its ability to protect individual rights, and the relationship between the federal courts and state officials, particularly in the context of the civil rights movement.
In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education,[161] in which the Court unanimously held that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, some southern officials challenged the authority of the Court’s decisions on issues concerning African-Americans’ civil rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, and school desegregation in particular. Some southern state legislatures passed “interposition” resolutions asserting that a given issue—typically, public education—was within the exclusive control of the state.[162] In 1956, nineteen senators and seventy-seven congressmen, all from former Confederate states, signed onto a document titled “The Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” but which became known as the “Southern Manifesto.”[163] Such efforts at blocking the implementation of the Court’s decisions explicitly borrowed from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of state sovereignty associated with James Madison and John C. Calhoun, among others.[164]
The reaction against the Brown decision sparked a number of proposals for constitutional amendments. Among the amendments presented to Congress by various state legislatures were the following:
- An amendment making the Senate the final appellate court with power to review decisions of the Supreme Court in cases “where questions of the powers reserved to the States, or the people, are either directly or indirectly involved and decided, and a State is a party or anywise interested in such question.”[165]
- An amendment setting term limits for federal judges and revising the method of selecting them.[166]
- A procedure according to which if one-fourth of the states disapproved of a decision by the Court that weakens states’ rights, the decision would be rendered null unless three-fourths of the states approved it.[167]
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