Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer case brief, 343 U.S. 579 (1952) (the Steel Seizure case)

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952)
(the Steel Seizure case)

-       When the steel workers went on strike during the Korean war, the president ordered that the steel mills be seized and kept open; when the president ordered this, Congress subsequently supported him
-       Did the president exceed his constitutional powers?
-       Majority Opinion:

• What is the framework for answering this question?
  • Justice Black says – look for authority in the Constitution or in an act of Congress
• Holding:
  • There was no act of Congress granting the power to the President (they had considered giving him the power but decided not to)
  • Thus, the order had to come from the president’s powers under the Constitution
    • The government argued that
      • the President’s power was derived from his commander-in-chief power – he had to do what was best for the military, and seizing the steel mills was what was best for the military since they were at war
      • the power should be implied from the aggregate of the President’s constitutional powers
    • The court finds that the president’s action was in effect a legislative act, and the Constitution tells us that Congress, and not the President, gets to legislate
      • This is a legislative act because it pertains to domestic labor relations (which does not fall within his foreign affairs powers)
• The majority took a formalistic approach and said that each branch of the federal government has its own “box” of authority; domestic labor relations are within Congress’ box of authority, not the president’s

-       Justice Jackson’s concurrence

• He looks at the federal government’s power as more interactive – the Constitution creates a scheme of interdependence as well as separate powers
  • These powers fluctuate in relation to what other branches have done
  • He does not like the formalistic approach, and favors a functionalist approach
• Sets out a framework for determining presidential powers
  • 1) when the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization from Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate
    • here, there is a presumption of validity, because Congress and the President have pooled their valid powers
    • to overcome that presumption of validity, one must show that the Federal Government as an undivided whole lacks the power; or that the delegation of power to the President was unconstitutional (example: Congress gives power to the president which is does not have the authority to delegate, such as powers left to the states in the10th Amendment)
  • 2) when the President acts in the absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can only rely upon his own independent powers, but there is a zone of twilight in which he and Congress may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain
    • When you are in the zone of twilight and Congress does not act, the president’s authority is enhanced, but is not per se constitutionally valid
    • Example of a twilight zone: war
  • 3) when the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for them he can only rely upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter
    • The constitutional validity of his act is sustained when he shows that he acted within the scope of his constitutional powers
  • Conceptualize the president’s power as a sphere, and Congress’ power as an overlapping sphere; in the overlap, both can act
    • When the president is in category three, he can only rely on his exclusive zone of competency, MINUS what was in the twilight zone
• Having set forth this framework, Jackson applies it to the seizure of the steel mills
  • This case falls in the third category
    • Not Category 1 – No congressional authorization existed for the seizure
    • Not Category 2 – Congress had covered seizure of private property by three statutory policies inconsistent with the seizure
    • Third Category: President claimed that he got the power to seize the steel mills from the “commander in chief” clause of the Constitution
  • Jackson then says that in internal affairs, it would be dangerous if the president had free reign over everything in the name of being commander in chief, so he finds that the president did not have the power to seize the steel mills