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Volume 2, Number 1
NEESE SAYS SUPREME COURT DECISIONS ARE NOT THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND
Attorney General Edwin Meese in a speech to the Tulane University Citizens' Forum on the Bicentennial of the Constitution, October 21, 1986, stated that Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution are not "the supreme law of the land." Decisions of the Supreme Court, he argued, are not "binding on all persons and parts of government henceforth and forevermore." The following commentary on the Attorney General's speech is written by William L. Taylor, a Washington lawyer:
It is little short of astonishing that Edwin Meese, in his latest assault on the authority of federal courts in interpreting the Constitution, should choose as his principal example of judicial excess the Supreme Court's 1958 decision in Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1, the Little Rock, Arkansas case.
Mr. Meese criticizes the statement of the unanimous Court in Cooper that its interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1954 Brown case "is the supreme law of land" with binding effect on the states. Mr. Meese replies that it is only the Constitution that is the supreme law of the land, not Supreme Court interpretations. The difference, in Meese's view, is that while the Brown decision was binding on the parties to the case and on the executive branch of government, it was not binding on other "persons and parts of government."
Cooper v. Aaron, it should be remembered, was the Supreme Court's first response to four years of massive resistance to the Brown decision, years in which Southern governors and legislatures supported by members of Congress (all in Mr. Meese's lexicon, "persons and parts of government"), solemnly asserted a right to interpose their authority to thwart rights declared under the Constitution by the Supreme Court. In Little Rock, Governor Faubus had called out the National Guard to prevent the enforcement of a federal court order requiring the admission of nine black students to Central High School. His actions and those of other segregationists created racial turmoil, threatened the safety of black and white students, stimulated requests for further delays in desegregation and resulted in closed schools in Little Rock for almost a year.
What was Faubus' justification for his actions? He argued in words now echoed by Mr. Meese, that federal court decisions were not the law of the land and were not binding on those who were not parties.
Certainly, as Justice Frankfurter said in Cooper, a Supreme Court interpretation of the Constitution does not stifle the right of dissent or call for criticism to be stilled. But it is ludicrous for Meese to equate Lincoln's criticism of the Dred Scott decision with the efforts of a Daniel Manion or an Orval Faubus use their official positions to try to prevent enforcement of a Supreme Court decision.
In Cooper the Court helped reestablish a fundamental principle that was then in peril that "no state legislator or executive or judicial officer can war against the Constitution without violating his undertaking to support it." Mr. Meese's consistent effort since becoming Attorney General has been to call that principle into question again. The rights of all citizens are more secure today because of the Court's decision in Cooper; they will be jeopardized anew if we do not understand and resist Mr. Meese's assault on the courts.
(William L. Taylor, as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1958, contributed to the brief filed in the Supreme Court by plaintiffs in CO02er v. Aaron.)
  
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