National Affairs: A Clear Violation

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The nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court filed out from behind their velour curtain on "decision Monday" this week and took their seats with routine solemnity. Chief Justice Fred Vinson looked out across the crowded chamber and announced that routine business would be postponed until after the reading of opinions in "the steel case." At his words, the chamber buzzed with electric anticipation.

On Vinson's right, Justice Hugo Lafayette Black put on his thick-rimmed glasses and picked up a sheaf of papers. In his Alabama half-drawl, he began reading the majority decision. Its conclusion:

¶ President Truman's seizure of the steel industry last April 8 was a clear violation of the Constitution.

¶ The mills must be restored to their owners forthwith.

It was a 6-3 decision: Justices Frankfurter, Douglas, Jackson, Clark and Burton concurred with Black; Chief Justice Vinson, Justices Reed and Minton disagreed, took a position in support of the President.

Ripe Question. Black's opinion was eloquently simple, and its austere logic fitted the gravity of the case. Said Black:

"The President's power to issue the order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself. There is no statute that expressly authorizes the President to take possession of property as he did here. Nor is there any act of Congress to which our attention has been directed from which such a power can fairly be implied."

On the contrary, when the Court looked back through the record it found that Congress had, in fact, rejected an amendment to the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 which would have authorized Government seizures in event of emergency. "The use of the seizure technique to solve labor disputes . . . was not only unauthorized by any congressional enactment; [but] Congress had refused to adopt that method of settling labor disputes."

Limited Functions, "It is clear that if the President had authority to issue the order he did, it must be found in some provisions of the Constitution . . . The order cannot properly be sustained as an exercise of the President's military power as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces ... We cannot with faithfulness to our constitutional system hold that the Commander in Chief . . . has the ultimate power, as such, to take possession of private property in order to keep labor disputes from stopping production. This is a job for the nation's lawmakers, not for its military authorities.

"Nor can the seizure order be sustained because of the . . . provisions that grant executive power to the President. In the framework of our Constitution, the President's power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker. The Constitution limits his functions in the lawmaking process to the recommending of laws he thinks wise and the vetoing of laws he thinks bad. And the Constitution is neither silent nor equivocal about who shall make laws which the President is to execute. The first section of the first article says that 'all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States . . .'"