Earl Warren’s Last Stand: Powell v. McCormack, Race, and the Political Question Doctrine
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPEarl Warren’s Last Stand: Powell v. McCormack, Race, and the Political Question Doctrine
Chief Justice Earl Warren had great expectations for Powell v. McCormack.1 According to his clerks, the Chief believed the case would be his swansong.2 He hoped the opinion would become an illustrious historical document, revered as canonical by future constitutional scholars.3 To Warren’s credit, the case contained all the trappings of a great constitutional showdown. At its center: the gregarious Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who was formally excluded from his seat after allegations of mismanaging funds.4 And the question—who had the power to unseat a fairly elected congressman?—highlighted the escalating tension between Congress and the Court.5 In a jab at the Court, the House report recommending Powell’s sanctions noted that the final vote would be immune to judicial review.6
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Handsome and charismatic, Adam Clayton Powell was a Baptist pastor elected to Congress from Harlem, New York, in 1944.
By the time the Supreme Court granted cert, New York’s 18th Congressional District had reelected Powell, and by the time the justices heard the oral argument Powell was sworn in to the 91st Congress. The case was essentially moot. And yet, Warren remained undeterred. One of his clerks hypothesized that Warren took the case because of the overt racial implications of excluding a congressman nicknamed “Mr. Civil Rights.”7 [End Page 44] Another stated that the Chief simply believed Congress “shafted” Powell.8 Many scholarly works discuss the case’s mitigation of the political question doctrine, but they do not theorize why Warren took this hyperpolitical, likely-moot case.9
This author posits that Warren avoided the persuasive reasons not to hear Powell v. McCormack because he believed Congress excluded Powell because of his race and civil rights advocacy. The respondents’ brief paid little attention to the clear inferences of racism in Powell’s exclusion, and when the issue was discussed at oral argument, the respondents’ advocate, Bruce Bromley, failed to assuage Warren’s concerns about impermissible racial discrimination. Mitigating the political question doctrine in separation-of-powers cases was the price Warren was willing to pay to remedy this discrimination. Despite the Chief’s altruistic motivations for this case, and despite the sacrifice he made to the political question doctrine for these motivations, his great expectations for Powell v. McCormack fell flat. As one clerk acknowledged, the decision “[has] not been the source of constitutional wisdom we thought it might be.”10
The Political Rise and Fall of Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr
Auspicious Beginnings: The House’s New Civil Rights Star
Born to a prominent Baptist preacher who led the nation’s oldest African American church, Representative Adam Clayton Powell’s time in the public eye began well before his election to the 79th Congress. At just twenty-two, Powell became an assistant pastor at his father’s church, and by the late 1930s, he was one of the most prominent political figures in Harlem. In 1944 he ran for Congress unopposed, and when Congress convened in 1945 he was escorted to the House Chamber by the only other Black representative, William Dawson.11 Dawson and Powell remained the only Black representatives until 1955. During Powell’s first years as a Representative, he sponsored several pieces of civil rights legislation, including a bill prohibiting segregation in interstate travel.12
However, as Powell’s tenure in Congress lengthened, so too did his list of run-ins with D.C.’s political elite. He once took the House floor to say of a fellow congressman, “The sooner [Representative] Martin Dies is buried, the better. . . . There is only one place fit for him to live and that’s Hitler’s outhouse.” Another time, he referred to First Lady Bess Truman as “the Last Lady” because she attended a Daughter of the American Revolution event after the organization refused to let Powell’s wife use one of its facilities. Yet another time, Representative Cleveland Bailey (D-WV) punched Powell in the jaw, claiming Powell was attempting to undermine his rider on a bill. When asked to comment on...
