Goldwater v. Carter 444 U.S.
996 (1979)
The case resulted from the 39th President of the United States Jimmy Carter’s
decision to unilaterally terminate the Mutual Defense Treaty of 1954 between the
United States and Taiwan. As the termination of the treaty involved a number of
political issues, several senators strongly disagreed with President Carter’s
decision. In response, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, along with others, filed a
suit against President Carter in the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C.
Senator Goldwater sought injunctive relief as well as a judgment declaring the
President’s termination of the Mutual Defense Treaty unconstitutional. In
particular, Senator Goldwater and the other plaintiffs argued that “President
Carter’s unilateral notice of termination violated the senators’ legislative right to be
consulted and to vote on the termination and also impaired the effectiveness of
prior votes approving the 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty.”
The district court found that the political question doctrine did not bar it from
hearing the case and held that President Carter’s action was unconstitutional. The
court held that “it would be incompatible with our system of checks and balances if
the executive power in the area of foreign affairs were construed to encompass a
unilateral power to terminate treaties.” The court explicitly rejected President
Carter’s arguments that he had the authority to unilaterally terminate treaties
pursuant to the executive’s appointments power, recognition power, or general
foreign affairs power. Rather, the court reasoned that “like treaty formation, treaty
termination is comprised of a series of acts that seek to maintain a constitutional
balance.” The court concluded that the President “alone cannot effect the repeal of
a law of the land which was formed by joint action of the executive and legislative
branches, whether that law be a statute or a treaty.”
However, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed, agreeing with the
lower court’s finding that the political question doctrine was not a bar to
justiciability, but concluding that President Carter acted within his foreign affairs
power when he terminated the Mutual Defense Treaty. The court of appeals
disagreed with the lower court’s arguments that the Supremacy Clause prevented
the president from unilaterally terminating treaties and that treaty termination is
properly analogized to treaty formation. On the contrary, the court reasoned that as
“no specific role is spelled out in the Constitution . . . for the Senate or the
Congress as a whole to terminate treaties. . . . The power consequently devolves
upon the President, and there is no basis for a court to imply a restriction on the
President’s power to terminate not contained in the Constitution.”
On appeal, rather than resolving the dispute between the lower courts about the
presidential and congressional roles in treaty termination, the Supreme Court
dismissed the case as falling under the political question doctrine.
Addressing the political nature of the dispute, Justice William Rehnquist wrote for
a plurality of the Court:
In light of the absence of any constitutional provision governing the termination of
a treaty, and the fact that different termination procedures may be appropriate for
different treaties, the instant case in my view also must surely be controlled by
political standards. We are asked to settle a dispute between coequal branches of
our Government, each of which has resources available to protect and assert its
interests.
In concurrence, Justice Powell refused to find that the issue was non justiciable,
but instead indicated: The Judicial Branch should not decide issues affecting the
allocation of power between the President and Congress until the political branches
reach a constitutional impasse. Otherwise, we would encourage small groups or
even individual Members of Congress to seek judicial resolution of issues before
the normal political process has the opportunity to resolve the conflict.
Only Justice Brennan would have reached the merits of the case and would have
found President Carter’s action constitutional. As for the rest of the court, the
language of Justices Powell and Rehnquist suggest that the case was not yet ripe
for decision by the Court. Thus, the Court did not foreclose discussion of the issue
of which branch has power over treaty termination, but rather suggested that such a
discussion must be initiated by the legislature and the executive.
