Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

While President Truman grounded his seizure order on the authority under “the Constitution and laws of the United States, and as President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the armed forces of the United States,” the Justice Department later argued in federal district court that the president had acted solely on the basis of inherent executive power, without any statutory authority. The assistant attorney general Holmes Baldridge told Judge Pine that the courts were powerless to control the exercise of presidential power under emergency conditions. Baldridge maintained that the president's emergency power was broad enough to meet any emergency. The only limitations on that power, he explained, were at the ballot box and in Congress's power of impeachment. At a news conference shortly after Baldridge's argument in federal court, President Truman was asked whether, if he could seize the steel mills under his inherent powers, he could “also seize the newspapers and/or radio stations?” Truman answered: “Under similar circumstances the President of the United States has to act for whatever is for the best of the country” (Truman, p. 273).

The Truman administration's assertion of an inherent emergency power was rejected by the federal district judge David Pine in a blistering opinion. In holding Truman's seizure of the steel industry to be unconstitutional, he acknowledged that a nationwide strike could cause extensive damage to the country, but he declared that a strike “would be less injurious to the public than the injury which would flow from a timorous judicial recognition that there is some basis for this claim to unlimited and unrestrained Executive power, which would be implicit in a failure to grant the injunction [to prohibit the seizure]” (103 F. Supp. 569, 577 [D.D.C. 1952]).

The case was framed for the Supreme Court by the Truman administration's claim of an inherent presidential power. On June 2, 1952, the Court, by a divided 6–3 vote, sustained Judge Pine's decision. The majority opinion sharply rejected the president's contention. In addition, five members of the Court—William Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, Harold Burton, and Tom Clark—wrote concurring opinions exploring presidential power in an emergency; while they expressed different views, they were united in their denial of an inherent executive power to seize private property when Congress has by statute prohibited it. Of the various opinions, Black's and Jackson's are the most significant.

Justice Hugo Black’s Majority Opinion

In the first paragraph of his opinion for the Court, Justice Black lays bare the distinctions between the arguments of the two sides. The owners of the steel mills contend that President Truman's order constitutes lawmaking, a power vested by the Constitution in Congress and not in the president. As such, the president has acted unconstitutionally. The administration, on the other hand, argues that the president acted to prevent a nationwide strike that would have inflicted great injury upon the country. In meeting the emergency, it is argued, the president is drawing upon the aggregate of his powers, including his inherent power, his authority as commander in chief, and his power as chief executive of the nation.

In paragraphs 2–4, Justice Black reviews the facts of the case, beginning with the dispute between the steel companies and the steelworkers that precipitated the call for a strike. After reviewing the lower court action, Black states in paragraph 5 that two particular issues have come before the Supreme Court. The first issue involves the question of whether the constitutional validity of the president's order should be determined. The second regards whether the president has the power to issue the order.

In paragraph 6 of his opinion, Justice Black assesses the administration's argument that Judge Pine never should have considered the merits of the case. Lawyers for the government contended that injunctive relief should have been denied to the steel companies, since the seizure of their property did not inflict irreparable damages and since even if damages had been suffered, the companies should have sought compensation in the Court of Claims. Black rejects those arguments by explaining that previous cases have cast doubt on the right to recover compensation in the Court of Claims when property has been unlawfully taken by the government for public use, the alleged purpose behind the seizure. In addition, Black believed that incalculable damages would indeed be sustained by the steel industry. As a result, he ruled that the case was ripe for review and that the Court should consider the merits of the issues.

In paragraph 7, Black states, famously, “The President's power, if any, to issue the order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.” Here, Black is expounding a fundamental principle of American constitutionalism. He notes that the Truman administration has not advanced any statutory authority for the seizure order. Black points out in a critical passage that Congress had, in its deliberation over the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, given consideration to an amendment that would have authorized the presidential seizure of property in an emergency—but Congress refused to vest the president with such authority. As such, as Black and other justices state, Congress effectively prohibited the president from taking property. Given that denial of authority, Black explains, the president's order would be constitutional only if it were grounded in the Constitution.

In paragraph 9, Justice Black makes short shrift of the commander-in-chief argument. While acknowledging that the “theater of war” is an expanding concept, he holds that it is not so expansive as to authorize the presidential seizure of private property within the United States. That power, Black notes, is vested in Congress, since it is a function to be performed by the nation's lawmakers. Black is surely right on this point. If the president possessed the authority to take private property, one would wonder where his authority would stop; the Constitution rejects the concept of unlimited power.

In paragraph 10, moreover, Justice Black rejects the vesting clause as justification for the president's order. In fact, as a matter of definition and enumeration of powers, the president's duty to execute the laws precludes him from making the laws. Here, Black is emphasizing a fundamental principle of the doctrine of separation of powers: Where a power is granted to one branch, it may not be exercised by another. Black points out that the president's role in the lawmaking process extends to the recommendation of legislation and to the veto of bills that he thinks unwise. In all events, Black justly insists, Article I of the Constitution vests the lawmaking power in Congress, not in the president.

Thus, the principal vice of Truman's order, as Black explains in paragraph 11, is that the president is engaging in lawmaking. His seizure order is not executing a policy enacted by Congress; it reflects, rather, a presidential policy that the president alone directs to be executed. In fact, as Black points out, the order assumes the form of a statute: It includes a preamble explaining why the president has adopted the policy, just as statutes set forth the reasoning behind the policy adopted by Congress. Truman's order, moreover, authorizes a governmental official to create additional rules and regulations, an act also reflecting the properties of a statute. According to Black, the fact that previous presidents have ordered the seizure of property is of no moment; most of the seizures had involved the exercise of statutory authority, as Justice Frankfurter notes in his concurring opinion. In any case, as Black states, Congress has not and may not surrender its constitutional power to seize property.

In the closing paragraph of his opinion, Justice Black provides a powerful summation, reminding readers that the framers of the Constitution made the solemn decision to entrust the lawmaking power to Congress—in “good and bad times.” A recounting of the familiar historical reasons that led the framers to that crucial decision is not necessary, Black explains. Rather, it should suffice to say that in a republic, the legislature is appointed as the lawmaking branch of government. At the time of the founding of the United States, the precise distinction between a monarchy and a republic was clearly understood to lie in the fact that the republican legislature made the law and the executive was subordinate to the law. Black's opinion rests on a solid historical foundation.

Justice Robert Jackson’s Concurrence

Jackson's opinion rests on the concept of a “fluid” presidential power, one that reflects the relative actions of the executive and Congress. He provides a framework for analysis that is grounded on three tiers. In the first tier, the president's power is at its zenith when he acts on the basis of his constitutional power plus all that Congress has by statute granted to him. In the second tier, some ambiguity can be occasioned by the uncertain constitutional allocation of power to the president and to Congress or by conflicting powers. In this “zone of twilight,” the exercise of power hinges on political imponderables: Which branch might act first? The uncertainty occurs when the president acts in the absence of either a grant or a denial of authority by Congress.

In the third tier, the president's power is at its lowest ebb whenever he acts in a manner that is in conflict with the expressed or implied will of Congress. In such instances, he is left to rely upon his own constitutional powers minus any that Congress might possess. President Truman's seizure order fell into this category; the Court thus ruled that he lacked the constitutional power to issue the order and that it was not authorized by Congress but, in fact, violated the implied will of that body, as indicated by its debate on the Taft-Hartley Act.

Additional Commentary by Lisa Paddock, Independent Scholar, Cape May County, New Jersey

The cold war that succeeded World War II suddenly waxed hot when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950. President Harry S. Truman sent troops into combat there without a formal declaration of war. Despite its downplayed status as a “police action,” the Korean War generated inflation in the United States, where wage and price controls ensued. The contract between the nation’s steelmakers and the steelworkers belonging to the Congress of Industrial Organizations expired at the end of 1951. When little progress was made toward a new agreement, the steelworkers threatened to strike.

Truman made an attempt to reconcile the two sides of the labor dispute by asking the federal Wage Stabilization Board to recommend new wages and steel prices, but when these recommendations were rejected, a strike seemed inevitable. Truman feared that such a labor action, which would inevitably lead to a shortage of ammunition, threatened the welfare of American troops on the battlefield in Korea as well as the outcome of the war. It was, needless to say, his job as commander in chief to see that American forces had what they needed to bring the action to a successful conclusion. For primarily political reasons, Truman declined to invoke the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to buy time (that is, an eighty-day cooling-off period) or to ask Congress to pass new legislation to resolve the impasse. Instead, Truman took the suggestion offered in a memo drafted by his former attorney general, Tom Clark, that he use his “inherent” powers as president to seize control of the steel mills.

Truman was probably encouraged to take this action by the fact that Tom Clark was by this time a member of the Supreme Court. The president was surely also encouraged by his friend Chief Justice Fred Vinson, who assured Truman that the seizure was legal. On April 8, 1952, one day before the strike deadline, Truman issued Executive Order 10340, authorizing his secretary of commerce, Charles Sawyer, to take control of the mills and run them in the government’s name until labor and management had come to terms. Truman put Congress on notice, but it took no action. The steelmakers did act, however, obtaining a temporary injunction restraining Sawyer from carrying out Truman’s order. The case was still before the federal appellate court when the Supreme Court agreed to hear it. Following an expedited schedule, the Court heard oral arguments less than a month later and issued its opinion after little more than two weeks of deliberation.

Like many other members of the Court, Hugo Black was a personal friend of Truman’s, but he was also the most senior justice voting with the six-member majority to declare the president’s action unconstitutional. As such, he had authority to select the author of the opinion of the Court, and he selected himself. For Black, what became known as the Steel Seizure Case was an easy one. In just eight brief paragraphs he works through the logic supporting the district court’s injunction. For Black, the Constitution is absolutely clear on the subject of separation of powers, and any official who exercises powers that exceed those spelled out in that document is acting unconstitutionally. The president’s power to issue an order such as Truman’s must stem either from the Constitution itself or from an act of Congress, the body empowered to pass enabling legislation. No such law was on the books. Furthermore, Black points out, the executive did not even claim to be relying on statute, instead relying on “implied” authority arising from the aggregate of constitutionally granted powers: “Particular reliance is placed on provisions in Article II which say that ‘The executive Power shall be vested in a President …’; that ‘he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’; and that he ‘shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.’”

For Black, such reasoning simply does not hold water. Although the concept of a battlefield is flexible, there is nothing in the Constitution to support the notion that the commander in chief has the wartime authority to seize private industry in order to prevent a strike from stopping production. As for the president’s executive power, his office’s mandate merely gives him the authority to recommend laws he thinks wise and veto those he finds bad. With Executive Order 10340, the president was not attempting to ensure the proper execution of a law as Congress intended it be executed; rather, the order was intended to ensure that presidential policy be carried out as he wished. Congress certainly has the authority to pass legislation enabling a presidential order to become law, whether to prescribe the taking of private property for public use, to govern labor relations, or to fix wages and working conditions. Congress can do all these things without subjecting such decisions to the control or supervision of the president or the military. In this case, however, Congress elected to remain silent.

In conference, Justice Felix Frankfurter expressed his wish that each of the nine justices write a separate opinion in the Steel Seizure Case, and he almost got his wish: each of the five other justices in the majority wrote a separate concurring opinion, while Chief Justice Vinson wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined by Stanley Reed and Sherman Minton. Robert Jackson’s concurring opinion, in particular, has been used subsequently to resist attempts to read inherent presidential powers into areas such as executive privilege, electronic surveillance, and national security. But it is Black’s opinion, brief, eloquent, and unadorned, that has come down as perhaps the final word on the necessity for restraining presidential power within the parameters afforded by the Constitution.