Nixon v. United States - Further Readings
Petitioner
Walter Nixon, U.S. District Judge
Respondent
United States, et al.
Petitioner's Claim
That Senate Rule XI, which allowed a Senate committee to hear evidence against an impeached official and present a report to the full Senate, violated theConstitution's Impeachment Trial Clause.
Chief Lawyer for Petitioner
David Overlock Stewart
Chief Lawyer for Respondent
Kenneth Starr, U.S. Solicitor General
Justices for the Court
Harry A. Blackmun, Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, William H. Rehnquist (writing for the Court), Antonin Scalia, David H. Souter, John Paul Stevens, Clarence Thomas, Byron R. White
Justices Dissenting
None
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
13 January 1993
Decision
That Nixon's claim regarding Senate Rule XI was nonjusticiable--that is, it was outside the Court's control, since the Constitution provided that the "Senate shall have sole Power to try any impeachments."
Significance
Nixon v. United States was one of those rare cases in which the Court's decision was not to decide. In calling upon the Court to overrule the Senate in an area of authority granted to that body by the Constitution, the petitioner was asking the Court to do something forbidden to it. In this sense theruling was in the spirit of Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Court's first significant decision, in which it refused to order that an appointed judge be allowed to take his office because to do so would be to overstep its powers.
Another Nixon, a Different Impeachment
Usually when the name "Nixon" is used in the context of impeachment, people think of President Richard M. Nixon, against whom the House of Representativesinitiated impeachment proceedings for his role in the coverup of the Watergate scandal. President Nixon was never impeached, however, because he chose toresign his office. The Nixon in Nixon v. United States was Walter Nixon, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Mississippi. Following reports that Nixon had accepted a bribe from a businessman in exchange for intervening on behalf of the businessman's son, who was underby prosecution by a local district attorney, a grand jury conducted an investigation of his activities. He was convicted on two counts of making false statements before a grand jury, and sentenced to prison. Unlike his namesake, Nixon never resigned, and therefore he continued to collect his judicial salarywhile in prison.
On 10 May 1989, the House of Representatives adopted three articles of impeachment against Nixon for high crimes and misdemeanors. The first two of thesecharged him with giving false testimony before the grand jury, the third withbringing disrepute on the federal judiciary. The House duly presented the articles to the Senate, which voted to invoke its own impeachment rule. Under Senate Rule XI, a presiding officer appoints a committee of senators to "receive evidence and take testimony;" upon appointment, the committee held four days of hearings during which ten witnesses, including Nixon himself, testified. The committee then presented to the full Senate a complete transcript of its proceedings, along with a report summarizing the evidence it had gathered.Nixon, along with the House impeachment manager, presented a brief to the Senate, and together the two sides argued on the Senate floor for the full threehours allotted for that purpose. Nixon gave a personal appeal, then he, as well as the House impeachment manager, answered questions from senators. By avote greater than the two-thirds majority required, the Senate elected to convict Nixon on the first two articles. The presiding officer then entered a judgment ordering the impeached judge to step down from his office.
Nixon filed suit in district court, seeking a declaratory judgment and the reinstatement of his salary on the grounds that Senate Rule XI violated ArticleI, section 3, clause 6 of the Constitution. The latter grants the Senate authority to "try"--the word would become significant--all impeachments, and Nixon held that because the evidentiary hearings did not take place before the full Senate, the impeachment proceedings were not a trial per se. The district court, however, held that his claim was nonjusticiable: because it involved the power expressly given to the Senate to "try any impeachments," itwas out of the court's hands. When Nixon took the case to the Supreme Court,the Washington Legal Foundation filed an amici curiae brief urging affirmance, and the advocacy group Public Citizen filed one urging reversal. Thechief lawyer for the United States was Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, whose name would soon become a household word when he was appointed independent counsel in investigations involving President Bill Clinton.
Simple Words: "Try" and "Sole"
The Supreme Court voted to affirm. Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for a unanimous Court, cited the Court's statement in Baker v. Carr (1962) thata controversy was nonjusticiable in any situation where there was "a textually demonstrated constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department; or a lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standardsfor resolving it . . . " This meant that if the Constitution had already given another department, in this case the Senate, the power to decide a case, or if the Court lacked any power to make a ruling, then a case was nonjusticiable. These two ideas could not be entirely separated, of course, as the chiefjustice pointed out: if there were no "judicially . . . manageable standards" for deciding a question, that usually indicated that it was already committed by the Constitution to another "political department."
The Impeachment Trial Clause in Article I, section 3 of the Constitution embodied in its language a "textual commitment" of impeachment proceedings to theSenate, Rehnquist held. The Court rejected Nixon's claim that the word "try"referred to a "judicial-style trial by the full Senate:" the word was not sufficiently precise, either as it was understood at the time the Constitutionwas written or in the present day, to make such a determination. What could be determined, however, was that the clause went on to provide "three very specific requirements" for impeachment proceedings: Senators had to be under oath, convictions had to be by a vote of two-thirds or greater, and in a case where the president himself was under trial, the chief justice would preside. As for the word "sole" in the provision "the Senate shall have the sole Powerto try all Impeachments," this too had a common-sense meaning--"that this authority is reposed in the Senate alone." Nixon had tried to construe "sole" tomean that the full Senate had to conduct the entire impeachment, including the testimony and evidence-gathering; this reading, however, would "impose onthe Senate additional procedural requirements that would be inconsistent withthe three express limitations that the Clause sets out." If there was any further doubt as to whether the judicial branch had power to intervene in theseproceedings, a review of the Constitutional Convention and the subsequent applications of the clause would dispel it.
Justice Rehnquist offered two other reasons why the case was nonjusticiable.First of all, if the Court had to review Senate impeachment proceedings, thiswould result in "exposing the country's political life--particularly if thePresident were impeached--to months, perhaps years, of chaos during judicialreview of Senate impeachment proceedings." A second reason was that if the Court did find fault with some aspect of the Senate proceedings, it would facea "difficulty of fashioning judicial relief" other from simply dismissing thejudgement of conviction.
Finally, the Court's holding of nonjusticiability was consistent with its ruling in Powell v. McCormack (1969). Unlike in Powell, if the Court allowed the Senate full authority to interpret the word "try," this wouldnot result in any unintended violation of some other constitutional provision. Courts could review legislative action that "transgresses identifiable textual limits"--the Supreme Court itself does so all the time--but that simple three-letter word "try" did not give the judicial branch power to place limitson the Senate's authority in this instance.
White Questions the Justiciability Ruling
Three justices filed concurring opinions. Justice Stevens wrote that there was no need to haggle over the words "try" and "sole;" all the Court needed tosettle the case was to recognize "the central fact that the Framers decided to assign the impeachment power to the Legislative Branch." Justices White andSouter in their concurring opinions, Stevens wrote, were also looking too deeply into the question, raising "improbable hypotheticals."
Justice White, joined by Justice Blackmun, wrote an opinion concurring in thejudgment. He considered the case to be justiciable, he said, but since the Senate had fulfilled its constitutional obligation, he was able to concur. ToJustice White, "the issue is whether the Constitution has given one of the political branches final responsibility for interpreting the scope and nature of such a power" as that indicated in the Senate's authority to try impeachments. Despite the Court's ruling in Baker, White wrote, there were few instances where this "final responsibility" was so clear-cut. It was not thatthe framers of the Constitution specifically wanted to keep the judiciary outof impeachment proceedings; rather, the issue of impeachment "vexed" them. Quoting The Federalist, White observed that the framers were more afraid of placing in one branch "the awful discretion, which a court of impeachments must necessarily have." Hence White questioned the Court's understanding of the word "try" as not offering a judicially manageable standard--that is, as a term that excluded the judiciary from impeachment proceedings.
Justice Souter concurred in the judgment, but he disagreed with the Court's unwillingness to consider the possibility that Senate impeachment proceedingsmight be justiciable in certain circumstances. Referring to a hypothetical situation raised by Justice White, in which the Senate might choose to impeachan official simply because he was "a bad guy," Souter wrote that in such a situation, "judicial interference might well be appropriate."
Impact
To some, the Court's decision in Nixon seemed, quite literally, judicious because it kept the Court out of an area constitutionally mandated to theSenate. Others took issue with the ruling. Rebecca L. Brown in Supreme Court Review, for instance, held that officials subjected to impeachment should have the same protection of the judicial branch given to any individualunder the Constitution. Thomas D. Amrine in Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy also faulted the decision as a retreat from Baker andPowell. Those two cases had seemed to indicate a willingness on the Court's part to offer judicial review of impeachments. In Amrine's view, the present ruling suggested that in the future the Court might decline to put limits on the powers of other branches.
Related Cases
Walter Nixon, U.S. District Judge
Respondent
United States, et al.
Petitioner's Claim
That Senate Rule XI, which allowed a Senate committee to hear evidence against an impeached official and present a report to the full Senate, violated theConstitution's Impeachment Trial Clause.
Chief Lawyer for Petitioner
David Overlock Stewart
Chief Lawyer for Respondent
Kenneth Starr, U.S. Solicitor General
Justices for the Court
Harry A. Blackmun, Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, William H. Rehnquist (writing for the Court), Antonin Scalia, David H. Souter, John Paul Stevens, Clarence Thomas, Byron R. White
Justices Dissenting
None
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
13 January 1993
Decision
That Nixon's claim regarding Senate Rule XI was nonjusticiable--that is, it was outside the Court's control, since the Constitution provided that the "Senate shall have sole Power to try any impeachments."
Significance
Nixon v. United States was one of those rare cases in which the Court's decision was not to decide. In calling upon the Court to overrule the Senate in an area of authority granted to that body by the Constitution, the petitioner was asking the Court to do something forbidden to it. In this sense theruling was in the spirit of Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Court's first significant decision, in which it refused to order that an appointed judge be allowed to take his office because to do so would be to overstep its powers.
Another Nixon, a Different Impeachment
Usually when the name "Nixon" is used in the context of impeachment, people think of President Richard M. Nixon, against whom the House of Representativesinitiated impeachment proceedings for his role in the coverup of the Watergate scandal. President Nixon was never impeached, however, because he chose toresign his office. The Nixon in Nixon v. United States was Walter Nixon, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Mississippi. Following reports that Nixon had accepted a bribe from a businessman in exchange for intervening on behalf of the businessman's son, who was underby prosecution by a local district attorney, a grand jury conducted an investigation of his activities. He was convicted on two counts of making false statements before a grand jury, and sentenced to prison. Unlike his namesake, Nixon never resigned, and therefore he continued to collect his judicial salarywhile in prison.
On 10 May 1989, the House of Representatives adopted three articles of impeachment against Nixon for high crimes and misdemeanors. The first two of thesecharged him with giving false testimony before the grand jury, the third withbringing disrepute on the federal judiciary. The House duly presented the articles to the Senate, which voted to invoke its own impeachment rule. Under Senate Rule XI, a presiding officer appoints a committee of senators to "receive evidence and take testimony;" upon appointment, the committee held four days of hearings during which ten witnesses, including Nixon himself, testified. The committee then presented to the full Senate a complete transcript of its proceedings, along with a report summarizing the evidence it had gathered.Nixon, along with the House impeachment manager, presented a brief to the Senate, and together the two sides argued on the Senate floor for the full threehours allotted for that purpose. Nixon gave a personal appeal, then he, as well as the House impeachment manager, answered questions from senators. By avote greater than the two-thirds majority required, the Senate elected to convict Nixon on the first two articles. The presiding officer then entered a judgment ordering the impeached judge to step down from his office.
Nixon filed suit in district court, seeking a declaratory judgment and the reinstatement of his salary on the grounds that Senate Rule XI violated ArticleI, section 3, clause 6 of the Constitution. The latter grants the Senate authority to "try"--the word would become significant--all impeachments, and Nixon held that because the evidentiary hearings did not take place before the full Senate, the impeachment proceedings were not a trial per se. The district court, however, held that his claim was nonjusticiable: because it involved the power expressly given to the Senate to "try any impeachments," itwas out of the court's hands. When Nixon took the case to the Supreme Court,the Washington Legal Foundation filed an amici curiae brief urging affirmance, and the advocacy group Public Citizen filed one urging reversal. Thechief lawyer for the United States was Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, whose name would soon become a household word when he was appointed independent counsel in investigations involving President Bill Clinton.
Simple Words: "Try" and "Sole"
The Supreme Court voted to affirm. Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for a unanimous Court, cited the Court's statement in Baker v. Carr (1962) thata controversy was nonjusticiable in any situation where there was "a textually demonstrated constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department; or a lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standardsfor resolving it . . . " This meant that if the Constitution had already given another department, in this case the Senate, the power to decide a case, or if the Court lacked any power to make a ruling, then a case was nonjusticiable. These two ideas could not be entirely separated, of course, as the chiefjustice pointed out: if there were no "judicially . . . manageable standards" for deciding a question, that usually indicated that it was already committed by the Constitution to another "political department."
The Impeachment Trial Clause in Article I, section 3 of the Constitution embodied in its language a "textual commitment" of impeachment proceedings to theSenate, Rehnquist held. The Court rejected Nixon's claim that the word "try"referred to a "judicial-style trial by the full Senate:" the word was not sufficiently precise, either as it was understood at the time the Constitutionwas written or in the present day, to make such a determination. What could be determined, however, was that the clause went on to provide "three very specific requirements" for impeachment proceedings: Senators had to be under oath, convictions had to be by a vote of two-thirds or greater, and in a case where the president himself was under trial, the chief justice would preside. As for the word "sole" in the provision "the Senate shall have the sole Powerto try all Impeachments," this too had a common-sense meaning--"that this authority is reposed in the Senate alone." Nixon had tried to construe "sole" tomean that the full Senate had to conduct the entire impeachment, including the testimony and evidence-gathering; this reading, however, would "impose onthe Senate additional procedural requirements that would be inconsistent withthe three express limitations that the Clause sets out." If there was any further doubt as to whether the judicial branch had power to intervene in theseproceedings, a review of the Constitutional Convention and the subsequent applications of the clause would dispel it.
Justice Rehnquist offered two other reasons why the case was nonjusticiable.First of all, if the Court had to review Senate impeachment proceedings, thiswould result in "exposing the country's political life--particularly if thePresident were impeached--to months, perhaps years, of chaos during judicialreview of Senate impeachment proceedings." A second reason was that if the Court did find fault with some aspect of the Senate proceedings, it would facea "difficulty of fashioning judicial relief" other from simply dismissing thejudgement of conviction.
Finally, the Court's holding of nonjusticiability was consistent with its ruling in Powell v. McCormack (1969). Unlike in Powell, if the Court allowed the Senate full authority to interpret the word "try," this wouldnot result in any unintended violation of some other constitutional provision. Courts could review legislative action that "transgresses identifiable textual limits"--the Supreme Court itself does so all the time--but that simple three-letter word "try" did not give the judicial branch power to place limitson the Senate's authority in this instance.
White Questions the Justiciability Ruling
Three justices filed concurring opinions. Justice Stevens wrote that there was no need to haggle over the words "try" and "sole;" all the Court needed tosettle the case was to recognize "the central fact that the Framers decided to assign the impeachment power to the Legislative Branch." Justices White andSouter in their concurring opinions, Stevens wrote, were also looking too deeply into the question, raising "improbable hypotheticals."
Justice White, joined by Justice Blackmun, wrote an opinion concurring in thejudgment. He considered the case to be justiciable, he said, but since the Senate had fulfilled its constitutional obligation, he was able to concur. ToJustice White, "the issue is whether the Constitution has given one of the political branches final responsibility for interpreting the scope and nature of such a power" as that indicated in the Senate's authority to try impeachments. Despite the Court's ruling in Baker, White wrote, there were few instances where this "final responsibility" was so clear-cut. It was not thatthe framers of the Constitution specifically wanted to keep the judiciary outof impeachment proceedings; rather, the issue of impeachment "vexed" them. Quoting The Federalist, White observed that the framers were more afraid of placing in one branch "the awful discretion, which a court of impeachments must necessarily have." Hence White questioned the Court's understanding of the word "try" as not offering a judicially manageable standard--that is, as a term that excluded the judiciary from impeachment proceedings.
Justice Souter concurred in the judgment, but he disagreed with the Court's unwillingness to consider the possibility that Senate impeachment proceedingsmight be justiciable in certain circumstances. Referring to a hypothetical situation raised by Justice White, in which the Senate might choose to impeachan official simply because he was "a bad guy," Souter wrote that in such a situation, "judicial interference might well be appropriate."
Impact
To some, the Court's decision in Nixon seemed, quite literally, judicious because it kept the Court out of an area constitutionally mandated to theSenate. Others took issue with the ruling. Rebecca L. Brown in Supreme Court Review, for instance, held that officials subjected to impeachment should have the same protection of the judicial branch given to any individualunder the Constitution. Thomas D. Amrine in Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy also faulted the decision as a retreat from Baker andPowell. Those two cases had seemed to indicate a willingness on the Court's part to offer judicial review of impeachments. In Amrine's view, the present ruling suggested that in the future the Court might decline to put limits on the powers of other branches.
Related Cases
- Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962).
- Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486 (1969).
- Associated General Contractors v. City of Jacksonville, 508 U.S. 656 (1993).
- Reno v. Catholic Social Services, 509 U.S. 43 (1993).
User Comments Add a comment…