The perm fails---credible threat of override is key.
Hager 16---Lisa Hager; BA at Wartburg College, MA at Kent State University, and PhD in Political Science. at Kent State University. "The legal, institutional, and political factors of congressional court-curbing: the purpose and seriousness of attempts to constrain the United States Supreme Court", August 2016, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=kent1468770292&disposition=inline)//AN
As the example at the beginning of this chapter illustrates, Congress can and does attempt to reverse or limit the impact of judicial decisions (i.e., RFRA) by enacting legislation when legislators disagree with the ideological content of the ruling (i.e., Oregon v. Smith [1990]) (e.g., Eskridge 1991; Uribe, Spriggs, and Hansford 2014). Since Congress overturns decisions it dislikes, but first attempts to achieve its policy goals and manipulate judicial behavior with Court-curbing legislation (Blackstone 2013; Engel 2011), it is reasonable to assume that the Court views these bills as a credible signal of legislative overrides. Numerous studies have documented that the justices engage in strategic decision-making to prevent Congress from reversing its rulings and erasing the Court’s impact on public policy (e.g., Bergara, Richman, and Spiller 2003; Eskridge 1991; Spiller and Gely 1992). Since the Court actively avoids overrides when congressional preferences are vastly different from those of the justices, it is plausible that the justices respond to Court-curbing legislation in a similar fashion.
This leads to the second research question relating to when Court-curbing bills cause changes in judicial behavior. Court-curbing legislation as a credible threat to the Court’s influence on public policy relies on Congress’s ability to override decisions if the bills do not elicit judicial deference to legislative preferences. Thus, it is probable that the Court does not respond to Court-curbing bills during periods of legislative gridlock when it is unlikely Congress will be able to enact legislation to overturn a given decision. In order to understand the conditions under which the relationship between Congress and the Court is dictated by the public policy preferences of each during periods of Court-curbing bill sponsorship, the next section will 6 discuss the assumptions underlying the behavior of each branch and the relevant theoretical frameworks that can be used to explain Court-Congress relations