Presidential Constraints on Supreme Court Decision-Making

Abstract

Separation-of-powers studies of judicial decision-making largely focus on congressional influences. Less attention is given to the role of presidents, which is surprising given their vast policy-making powers. Accordingly, we develop a new theory of how presidents influence the Supreme Court’s review of statutes through potential legislative and administrative action. Using a data set of all federal laws passed between 1948 and 2015, we find, like others, that judicial review is less likely to occur when the court faces an ideologically hostile Congress. Unlike previous work, we reveal that such constraint is only effective when Congress is aligned with the president, who is less inclined to veto court-curbing legislation. We also find that the court’s distance to the president is constraining given threats of nonenforcement, but only when the law is salient, the president and public align, and the president exerts more control over implementation.