Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic by Eric Lomazoff

Author:Eric Lomazoff [Lomazoff, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226579450
Google: 2NdvDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38923608
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2018-09-10T13:11:57+00:00

Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated that two hundred years after the fact, we still have much to learn about the Court’s landmark decision in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). Students of the case have historically paid little attention to the constitutional dimension of the national bank’s rebirth—in particular, the Republican regime’s decision to justify the institution with reference to the Coinage Clause. This has blinded us to several crucial aspects of the Marshall Court’s work, including the historical reality that the justices offered a very different justification for the Bank and the fact that several features of the Constitution made their deviation possible. These aspects of McCulloch, in turn, invite us to acknowledge two others. First, because the Court’s answer to the congressional power question differed from that of the political branches, it represents an exercise in departmentalism. Second, while the Court’s first major conclusion in the case—that Congress was empowered to charter the Bank of the United States—squared with the preferences of the dominant political coalition, the reasoning behind that conclusion surely did not. Students of judicial behavior tend to classify decisions solely in terms of their outcome, but doing so here—that is, simply characterizing McCulloch as majoritarian—would fail to capture why the case was anathema to so many Republicans.

It may be too much, however, to claim that the Compromise of 1816 ultimately helps us make better sense of what occurred in McCulloch. In truth, the events surrounding the Bank’s revival raise as many questions about the case as they answer. Even if the institution’s attorneys, for whatever reason, preferred to defend their client as “necessary” for exercising one or more of Congress’s fiscal powers, why did they fail to cite the Coinage Clause as a fallback claim on the national bank’s behalf? More importantly, why did the Court prefer to resolve the congressional power question on its own constitutional terms rather than those supplied by the Fourteenth Congress? For both questions, the available evidence does a better job of inviting speculation (and future research) than of furnishing an answer. All told, it is safer to conclude that the Compromise of 1816, rather than helping us make better sense of McCulloch, invites us to appreciate new aspects of it.

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