Reagan, Ronald (1911–) (Update)

• Author: Charles R. Kesler
• Pages: 2126-2129

Page 2126

No President since FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT devoted as much of his administration's attention to the courts and the Constitution as did Ronald Reagan. After a career as an actor and spokesman for General Electric, Reagan was catapulted into politics by a famous televised speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. Twice elected governor of California, Reagan was hailed as the conservative standard-bearer in his unsuccessful race for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. He came to office in 1980 pledging to reinvigorate the idea of LIMITED GOVERNMENT?to restore what he saw as the constitutional foundations of American politics. In part, this restoration would involve restricting the federal government's encroachments on individual freedom and on the prerogatives of state governments. But more important, it would require that the doctrines stimulating the federal government's inordinate growth be publicly discredited and supplanted.

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Reagan won the 1980 presidential election by a large margin and set to work to lower federal tax rates and shore up America's defenses. These tasks absorbed most of his and his administration's attention even after his still more massive electoral victory in 1984; but Reagan wished always to make the "Reagan Revolution" something broader and deeper?what he called in his 1985 State of the Union Address "a Second American Revolution." The changes in economic and defense policy won in the great legislative battles of his first term had therefore to be parlayed into a general rethinking of the purposes of American politics and, especially, of the functions served by the courts.

Large changes in American electoral politics, particularly in the wake of so-called critical or realigning elections, do eventually register on the judiciary (as in 1937, with the "switch in time" that "saves nine") and sometimes on the Constitution itself (for example, the Civil War amendments). Indeed, in Reagan's view, the LIBERALISM that he attacked had always put a high premium on control of the judiciary, from FDR's COURT-PACKING PLAN to the activism of Chief Justice EARL WARREN to President JIMMY CARTER'S efforts to apply strict AFFIRMATIVE ACTION standards to judicial appointments. But Reagan faced the novel circumstance of trying to undo a series of divisive liberal measures that the Supreme Court itself had directed?the legalization of ABORTION, the expulsion of prayer from the public schools, the promulgation of the EXCLUSIONARY RULE, and so forth.

These issues were particularly important to the social conservatives who had joined with traditional Republicans and anticommunists in the 1960s and 1970s to form the coalition that would eventually sweep Reagan into office. Although Reagan campaigned both in 1980 and 1984 for the overruling of such Supreme Court decisions, he himself did little to dislodge them, except to call for constitutional amendments to protect the life of the unborn and to allow voluntary SCHOOL PRAYER in public classrooms. To confront the Court more directly would have risked alienating the more libertarian members of his coalition, which was united more by its common enemies than by common principles. Instead, he concentrated his administration's energies on the selection of judges pledged to exercise "judicial restraint" and, therefore, more likely over time to modify or overturn their predecessors' activist decisions.

It is probably in this way that the Reagan administration will have its great effect on CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION. In the course of his presidency, Reagan appointed more than 400 federal judges, nearly half the federal bench, as well as three Supreme Court Justices; and he elevated WILLIAM H. REHNQUIST to CHIEF JUSTICE of the Supreme Court in 1986. All these appointments were vetted and approved by an elaborate machinery centered in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy and overseen by a newly created White House Judicial Selection Committee. Critics objected to the screening procedure, claiming that it politicized the judicial selection process by subjecting candidates to a "litmus test" on such issues as abortion and CRIMINAL PROCEDURE. But the Reagan administration denied the charge, arguing that the reviews focused not on specific issues, but on the candidates' general approach to legal and constitutional interpretation, which the President...