Comments on the Majority Opinions in the Supreme Court Decision in the Steel Case, with Attachments
Images (13)
Document
| id |
id
159441548
|
|---|---|
| contentType |
contentType
document
|
| source |
source
import
|
Source image fields (6)
Extracted text
OCR Page 1 of 13COMMENTS ON THE MAJORITY OPINIONS IN THE SUPREME
ARCHIVES **RATIONAL RECORDS AMO
COURT DECISION IN THE STEEL CASE
l. Although not one of the six Justices upholding Judge Pine's
ruling contested the validity of the Government's voluminous evidence
that an extraordinary emergency faced the Nation on the eve of the
steel seizure, the majority nevertheless chose to overlook this evidence
and based their decision on the premise that in their opinion the
situation was in no sense as urgent as past defense crises in which the
Presidential powers were invoked. Only Justices Black and Douglas
stated the rigid doctrine that the President could act only under
specific statutory or constitutional authority, regardless of the urgency
of
the immediate situation. Justices Frankfurter and Burton make it
clear that under other circumstances -- declared war or threat of in-
vasion or immediate attack -- they might reach a different conclusion.
And Justice Douglas, in a footnote, concludes that wartime seizures by
the military are in a different category. Thus, by rejecting the
President's judgment that the emergency crisis in the steel case
warranted resort to extraordinary powers available to Presidents in
the past, the Court has embarked upon a questionable practice of going
behind a Presidential determination of an emergency in the face of
compelling evidence that such an emergency exi sted.
2. Justices Black, Frankfurter, Burton and Jackson were very
much swayed by the fact that in 1947 the Congress considered seizure
Relations
belongs_to