Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1979

Goldwater Et Al. v. Carter, President of the United States, Et Al.

444 U.S. 996

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Takeaway

In short, this case erased the lower court’s ruling on presidential treaty termination but produced no majority answer to the constitutional question; the Justices divided chiefly between political-question and ripeness grounds for staying out of the dispute.

Background

President Carter recognized the People’s Republic of China and, as part of that diplomatic change, gave notice that the United States would terminate its mutual-defense treaty with Taiwan. Senator Barry Goldwater and other Members of Congress sued, contending that the President could not terminate the treaty without Senate or congressional approval.

The Court of Appeals decided the dispute on the merits. The Supreme Court granted certiorari, vacated that judgment, and remanded with instructions to dismiss the complaint. Although the Court agreed on dismissal, no single rationale commanded a majority: four Justices treated the dispute as a nonjusticiable political question, while Justice Powell would have dismissed it as unripe.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the federal courts should resolve the Members of Congress’s challenge to President Carter’s unilateral termination of the Taiwan treaty.

Holding

No. The Court vacated the Court of Appeals’ judgment and directed dismissal of the complaint, but no majority agreed on a single basis for dismissal.

Reasoning

The Court’s order displaced the Court of Appeals’ merits ruling and required the District Court to dismiss the suit. Justice Rehnquist’s concurrence, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Stewart and Stevens, concluded that the controversy was a nonjusticiable political question. Justice Powell agreed that dismissal was proper, but concluded that the controversy was not yet ripe. Justice Marshall concurred only in the result.

Because neither the political-question rationale nor the ripeness rationale obtained five votes, Goldwater did not establish a majority Supreme Court rule defining the President’s treaty-termination power. The Court left the underlying constitutional question unresolved and prevented the lower court’s merits decision from having continuing legal effect.

Concurrences

Justice Powell

Reasoning

Justice Powell agreed that the complaint should be dismissed, but he rejected the view that treaty termination is always a political question beyond judicial review. In his view, courts may decide a genuine constitutional clash between Congress and the President when the political branches have reached an actual impasse.

The case was unripe because only a few Members of Congress had sued. Neither the Senate nor the House had taken formal action rejecting the President’s assertion of authority, and the Senate had not finally adopted a resolution requiring its approval for treaty termination. If Congress chose not to confront the President, the Judiciary should not initiate that confrontation.

Powell also maintained that the constitutional issue would be judicially manageable if a real interbranch conflict arose. The Constitution does not expressly assign treaty termination to the President alone, and deciding whether congressional participation is required would call for ordinary constitutional interpretation, not judicial management of foreign-policy choices.

Justice Rehnquist

Reasoning

Justice Rehnquist concluded that the central dispute was political and therefore nonjusticiable. The Constitution specifies the Senate’s role in making treaties but says nothing about its role in ending them. In his view, that silence leaves treaty termination to political standards and to resolution between the political branches rather than to judicially enforceable rules.

The foreign-relations setting reinforced that conclusion. The dispute concerned the President’s conduct of diplomacy and the termination of a defense commitment to a foreign government, an area in which the Executive and Congress each possess substantial institutional tools to protect their interests without judicial intervention.

Justice Rehnquist distinguished Youngstown because that case involved private litigants challenging a presidential seizure with direct domestic consequences. Here, the dispute was between coequal political branches, each able to press its own constitutional position through political means. Because the lower courts should not have reached a political question, their merits judgment had to be vacated before the complaint was dismissed.

Dissents

Justice Blackmun

Reasoning

Justice Blackmun, joined by Justice White, objected to the Court’s summary disposition. He believed that the timing concerns invoked to justify dismissal were illusory: if the President lacked authority to terminate the treaty, the notice of termination would have no legal effect.

In Blackmun’s view, the Court should not decide justiciability, standing, ripeness, or the merits without full briefing and oral argument. He would have granted review and given the important constitutional controversy plenary consideration.

Justice Brennan

Reasoning

Justice Brennan would have affirmed the Court of Appeals insofar as its judgment rested on the President’s exclusive authority to recognize and withdraw recognition from foreign governments. He viewed the treaty’s termination as a necessary consequence of the President’s decision to recognize the government in Beijing rather than the government in Taiwan.

Brennan rejected the claim that the political-question doctrine barred all judicial consideration merely because the case involved foreign affairs. Courts may decide the antecedent constitutional question of which branch possesses decisionmaking authority; the doctrine instead bars review of a foreign-policy judgment once the Constitution commits that judgment to a particular political branch.

Because recognition and derecognition are committed to the President alone, Brennan reasoned that judicial inquiry should end there. The Court could uphold this particular treaty termination narrowly, without announcing a general constitutional rule governing every possible treaty-termination dispute.