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Congress says no. They will disagree with Court rulings, and the politics DA proves they don’t like the plan.

Neal Devins 8. Professor of Law and Government at the College of William & Mary School of Law, J.D. from Vanderbilt University, A.B. in Government from Georgetown University.

“Congressional Responses to Judicial Decisions,” William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository, https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2671&context=facpubs

Congress may also respond to a Supreme Court decision by reenacting a statute that the Court struck down. For example, Congress strongly disagreed with the Court's 1918 ruling that the commerce power could not be used to regulate child labor (Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U. S. 25 1 [19 18]). The very next year, Congress sought to make use of an alternative power (the taxing power) to enact child labor legislation . Again, the Supreme Court struck the statute down (Child Labor Tax Case, 259 U.S. 20 [1922]). In 1938, after the Court's composition had changed, Congress again based child labor legislation on commerce clause legislation that a unanimous Court upheld (United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100 [1941]).

Congress has also taken aim at Court decisions through its powers to enforce the Fourteenth (equal protection) and Fifteenth (voting rights) Amendments. Rejecting a 1980 Supreme Court decision requiring civil rights plaintiffs to prove intentional discrimination in vote dilution cases (Mo bile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 [1980]), Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to allow for impact-based proof.~ of vote dilution. Congress likewise disapproved of the 1990 Supreme Court decision in Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 ( 1990) that limited the ability of plaintiffs to succeed in religious liberty lawsuits, and enacted legislation that required governmental actors to have a "compelling governmental interest" whenever religious liberty was " burdened. " This legislation , the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), was subsequently invalidated by the Supreme Court in City of Boerne 1). Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997). Unwilling to accept defeat, Congress enacted a scaled down version of the RFRA, the Religious Land Use and institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), a statute thar the Supreme Court upheld (against a Preliminary challenge) in 2005 (Cutter v. Willeinson, 544 U.S. 709 [2005]).

The RLU1PA statute highlights Congress's willingness to respond to a Court ruling by advancing its policy agenda in ways that it thinks the Court will approve. When enacting RLUIPA, lawmakers paid close attention to the Supreme Court decision invalidating the RFRA with Boerne v. Flores, 52 1 U.S. 507 (997), seeking to advance their policy agenda while not calling into question the Court's handiwork. Likewise, after the Supreme Court invalidated a stature banning guns within 1,000 fee l' of a school (as an impermissible exercise of Congress's commerce power) in United States v. Lopez, 5 14 U.S. 548 (1995), Congress amended the G un-Free School Zones Act to require the federal government to prove that the firearm had either moved in interstate commerce or otherwise Affected interstate commerce.

Another way that Congress expresses its disagreement with the Supreme Court is to protect rights that the Court says it need not protect. Following a 1986 Supreme Court decision upholding an Air Force regulation that had prohibited an observant Jew from wearing a yarmulke in Golden v. Weinburger, 475 U.S. 503, Congress enacted legislation allowing service members to express their faith by wearing neat and conservative Religious apparel. In 1999, Congress responded to concerns that independent counsels were overzealous when investigating high-ranking executive branch officials. Specifically, notwithstanding the Supreme Court's lopsided seven-to-one approval of this statute with the decision of Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654, in 1988, Congress concluded that the statute was fundamentally flawed and ought not to be reauthorized with the Ethics in Government Act.

Congressional responses to Supreme Court decisions are not always hostile. Sometimes the Court invites Congress to enact legislation that would effectively negate a Court ruling. For example, when upholding state power to issue search warrants of newspapers, the Court invited a legislative response noting that its decision " does nor prevent or advise against legislative or executive efforts to establish nonconsititutional protections against possible abuses of the search warrant procedure" (Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, 436 U.S. 547 [1978]). Congress accepted the invitation, passing the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 to prohibit third-party searches of newspapers.

On other occasions, Congress affirmatively assists in the implementation of a Court decision . In response to resistance in the South to school desegregation, Congress took bold steps to make Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), a reality. In 1964, it prohibited segregated school systems from receiving federal aid and authorized the Department of justice to file desegregation lawsuits. These federal efforts proved critical to ending dual school systems. More desegregation took place the year after these legislative programs took effect than in the decade following Brown.

As the above discussion makes clear, the Supreme Court does not speak the last word on the meaning of federal statutes or the Constitution. Congress can nullify Supreme Court interpretations of federal statutes by enacting a new statute or amending an existing law. On constitutional issues, the dynamic is more complex. Congress can respond to Supreme Court constitutional rulings through a variety of techniques, ranging from the enactment of the very same statute to the confirmation of Supreme Court justices who are likely to distinguish or overturn disfavored rulings. Through these varied responses to Supreme Court rulings, Congress plays a critical role in shaping constitutional values.

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