Introductory textbooks on American government tell us that the Supreme Court is independent from the elected branches and that independent courts better protect rights than their more deferential counterparts. But are these facts or myths? In this groundbreaking new work Anna Harvey reports evidence showing that the Supreme Court is in fact extraordinarily deferential to congressional preferences in its constitutional rulings. Analyzing cross-national evidence Harvey also finds that the rights protections we enjoy in the United States appear to be largely due to the fact that we do not have an independent Supreme Court. In fact we would likely have even greater protections for political and economic rights were we to prohibit our federal courts from exercising judicial review altogether. Harvey's findings suggest that constitutional designers would be wise to heed Thomas Jefferson's advice to "let mercy be the character of the law-giver but let the judge be a mere machine." "Using innovative analytic techniques, Anna Harvey offers a surprising argument, that the Supreme Court responds to changes in the partisan composition of the House of Representatives. Her extension of the argument to raise questions about the value of judicial independence and judicial review in established democracies is especially interesting."—Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School -- Mark Tushnet "A rigorous examination of the role of the Supreme Court in the American system of checks and balances."—Jeffrey A. Segal, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Chair, Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University -- Jeffrey Segal "There is no scholar whose work on judicial independence is more provocative or demands greater attention than Anna Harvey.  Professor Harvey’s empirical finding that the U.S. Supreme Court is responsive to the preferences of the House of Representatives poses a profound challenge to the conventional wisdom about both judicial independence and the Supreme Court.   This conclusion is documented at length with painstaking methodological rigor and transparency.  In particular, her strategy of drawing inferences from what she terms the “missing docket,” or the cases that the Court declines to hear, is instructive and groundbreaking.    This book ought to be a must-read for constitutional scholars, law and courts scholars, judicial politics scholars, and public law scholars alike." - David Law, Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis -- David Law Anna Harvey is associate professor of political science at New York University. A MERE MACHINE The Supreme Court, Congress, and American Democracy By Anna Harvey Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 2013 Anna Harvey All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-300-17111-2 Contents Preface: "A Mere Machine"..................................................ix1. The Supreme Court, Congress, and American Democracy.....................12. The Supreme Court, the Elected Branches, and the Constitution...........353. Estimating the Effect of Elected Branch Preferences on Supreme Court Judgments..................................................................774. The Puzzle of the Two Rehnquist Courts..................................1075. Explaining the Puzzle of the Two Rehnquist Courts.......................1416. Elected Branch Preferences, Public Opinion, or Socioeconomic Trends?....1917. Restoring the Court's Missing Docket....................................2238. Misreading the Roberts Court............................................2499. What's So Great About Independent Courts, Anyway?.......................264Notes......................................................................297Index......................................................................351 CHAPTER 1 THE SUPREME COURT, CONGRESS,AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY Americans are routinely exhorted to take pride in their independentfederal judiciary. Protected by life tenure and guaranteed salaries,federal judges in the United States are said to resolve disputes free fromthe political intimidation that exists in other, less fortunate, countries.The late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist declared, for example, that"the performance of the judicial branch of the United States governmentfor a period of nearly two hundred years has shown it to be remarkablyindependent of the other coordinate branches of that government," andthat "the creation of an independent constitutional court" was "probablythe most significant single contribution the United States has made to theart of government." Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has assertedthat the "independent" federal judiciary in the United States is the "envyof the world." Justice Stephen Breyer has written that "judicial independence... offers meaningful protection for the fundamental politicalrights that every American enjoys ... that independence is a nationaltreasure." Because of their independence, fede