EXCLUSIVE: The White House and the Supreme Court have a complicated relationship these days.
When President Biden took office, he launched a commission on reorganizing the court, responding to calls for structural reforms — and the court has pushed back on many of his most far-reaching policies.
At the same time, former President Trump, who nominated three people to the Supreme Court, faces multiple legal matters that may end up before the justices.
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Yet there was a time when presidents revered the court, and they believed that keeping the bench beyond politics was necessary not only for the separation of powers, but America’s way of life. No president embodied this philosophy more than William Howard Taft.
Of course, it helped that Taft hadn’t wanted to be president in the first place.
He wanted to be the chief justice.
Taft’s father, Alphonso, was America’s attorney general, and he instilled in his son the belief that "to be chief justice of the United States is more than to be president."
After graduating from Yale, William Howard Taft became the youngest judge in Ohio, at age 29.
At 32, he was solicitor general of the United States.
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He argued 18 cases before the court, winning 15 of them.
The Supreme Court, not the White House, looked like it was next.
The two most important people in his life had other ideas: his wife, Nellie Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt.
Nellie Taft didn’t want to be a judge’s wife; she wanted to be first lady (and, in a different age, might have run for president herself).
Theodore Roosevelt offered Taft a spot on the bench on three occasions, but the timing was never right — and Roosevelt and Nellie conspired to get Taft into the White House instead.
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With the plans coming into place, over dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue one night, Roosevelt teased his famously rotund guest, "I see a man weighing 350 pounds. There is something hanging over his head… At one time it looks like the presidency, then again it looks like the chief justiceship."
"Make it the chief justiceship," pleaded Mr. Taft.
"Make it the presidency," replied Mrs. Taft.
Mrs. Taft got her way in 1908.
Taft wasn’t a politician, and he’d never run for office before he was president.
He’d been appointed to every government job he’d ever had. But he was a judge at heart, and he acted like it — even as president.
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Whereas Roosevelt used the bully pulpit to push Congress in one direction or another, proposing and advocating policies on everything from conservation, to antitrust, to foreign policy, Taft did not. He believed in a constitutionally limited role for his office, and that all legislative power belonged with Congress, not the president.
That constitutionalist philosophy determined how he engaged in policy debates. When Congress went back and forth about tariffs, Taft didn’t call members telling them how to vote.
Instead, he issued a short, 340-word statement that didn’t take a position and just emphasized the importance of the matter: "The less time given to other subjects of legislation in this session," he advised, "the better for the country."
As constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen notes, Taft was "the only president to approach the office in constitutional terms above all."
Not everyone in the Republican Party appreciated that approach.
Contemporaries once joked that T.A.F.T. stood for "take advice from Theodore" — but TR grew angry at his successor’s policies and personnel choices.
When a frustrated Roosevelt ran as a third-party Bull Moose candidate against Taft in 1912, though, he handed the presidency to Woodrow Wilson, a man very unlike Taft who believed the Constitution was out of step with the times.
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Wilson said the document "was founded on the law of gravitation… The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live."
Before Wilson, in his own four years as president, Taft had made his mark on the Supreme Court.
He nominated six justices, more than any other president in a single term, before or since. But he always had in the back of his mind that he’d one day be heading to the bench, and he once jokingly told his nominees, "Damn you, if any of you die, I’ll disown you!"
He did join them in 1921, when Republican Warren G. Harding made Taft the 10th chief justice of the United States. By that point, after more than six decades of waiting, Taft told his new colleagues, "I don’t remember that I was ever president."
For nearly 10 years, Taft led the Article III branch, writing majority opinions and dissents on issues of the day, including Prohibition, surveillance, labor and the limits of presidential power.
He changed how the Supreme Court chooses its case docket, and he was behind the effort to get the Supreme Court its own building (until then, its chambers were in the basement of the U.S. Capitol, but Taft believed that the separation of powers required separate facilities).
Near the end of his life, after Taft retired from the bench, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes visited.
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He told his old boss, "We call you Chief Justice still, for we cannot give up the title by which we have known you all these later years and which you have made so dear to us."
The president, and even Congress, can choose to make the court about politics — or they can choose to direct it toward the Constitution.
Taft chose the latter.
In so doing, he reminded the justices, and the country, why the courts matter — and the importance of their role in our constitutional system of government.
Excerpted from "Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House," © copyright Jared Cohen (Simon & Schuster, Feb. 2024), by special arrangement. All rights reserved.
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