Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. V. Sawyer - Effects of The Decision

Effects of The Decision

Within minutes of the Court's ruling, Truman ordered Commerce Secretary Charles Sawyer to return the steel mills to their owners. Sawyer did so immediately. The Steelworkers went out on strike again shortly thereafter. The strike lasted for more than fifty days until the President threatened to use the somewhat cumbersome procedures under the Selective Service Act to seize the mills.

Truman was stunned by the decision, which he continued to attack years later in his Memoirs. Justice Black was concerned enough that Truman would take the decision personally that he invited Truman and his fellow Justices to a party at his home. Truman, still smarting from the defeat, was mollified somewhat by Black's hospitality; as he told Black, "Hugo, I don't much care for your law, but, by golly, this bourbon is good".

The multiplicity of opinions made it difficult to determine just what the Court had decided as to whether and when the President had authority to act without Congressional authorization. In large part this was the result of the fact that the administration had made a weak case—the evidence of an actual emergency was tenuous, given the substantial stockpiles of steel products in many sectors of the economy at the time—even weaker by overstating its position and offering incoherent arguments in the early phases of the litigation that turned public opinion against it, while framing the public debate in the most simplistic terms.

The decision nonetheless has had a broad impact. It represented a check on the most extreme claims of executive power at the time. It also represented the Court's assertion of its own role in intervening in political questions, as the Court later did in Baker v. Carr and Powell v. McCormack. The Court also applied the Frankfurter-Jackson approach to analyzing Congress' legislative authorization of Presidential action in invalidating efforts by the Nixon administration to plant wiretaps without prior judicial approval, while citing it more generally in support of its decision to permit litigation against the President to proceed in Clinton v. Jones. The high court also relied on Youngstown in Medellín v. Texas, 06-984 (2008). In that case, President Bush had pressured the state of Texas to review the murder conviction of a Mexican citizen who had tortured and raped two teenage girls in 1993, arguing that a 2004 decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) required law enforcement authorities to tell the accused of his right under the Vienna Convention to notify Mexican diplomats of his detention. In a 6-to-3 decision, the Court held that ICJ rulings were not enforceable in the United States, and Bush's actions were unconstitutional. Quoting Youngstown Sheet & Tube, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded, "The president's authority to act, as with the exercise of any governmental power, 'must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.'"

But the Court drew back from some of the implications of its decision, refusing to rely on Youngstown as authority to review the failed challenges brought against the War in Vietnam and deferring to the Executive's authority over foreign policy in cases such as Zemel v. Rusk. The Court cited Youngstown in the 2006 decision Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.