Why Didnt William Howard Taft Became President Again
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William Howard Taft never really wanted to exist president. Politics was his wife'due south appetite for him, not his ain. Before he was Secretarial assistant of War or governor of the Philippines, Taft, an intellectual son and grandson of judges, spent eight beatific years equally a federal appeals court judge. "I dearest judges, and I dear courts," President Taft said in a speech in 1911. "They are my ethics that typify on earth what we shall encounter hereafter in heaven under a just God." When Taft promoted associate Supreme Court justice Edward D. White of Louisiana to principal justice in 1910, he confessed his green-eyed to his attorney general. "There is nothing I would accept loved more than being master justice of the U.s.a.," he said.
Years after his humiliating 3rd-place defeat in the 1912 presidential ballot, Taft finally got his dream job. In June 1921, President Warren Harding nominated Taft, age 63, to lead the Supreme Court. Taft served nine years as chief justice afterward his four years as president—the only person to hold both jobs. "He loathed being president," Justice Felix Frankfurter once observed, "and being chief justice was all happiness for him."
Americans call up presidents better than they remember chief justices, but Taft was a ameliorate estimate than executive, and his judicial leadership arguably left a more lasting mark on the nation. Today, as conservatives promise the next Supreme Court appointments give them the power to remake American law and liberals look to it to bank check the excesses they look from the president-elect, both live in a judicial world Taft created.
Taft was a reluctant president, accepting the 1908 Republican nomination just after his wife, Nellie, and sitting President Theodore Roosevelt persuaded him to run as his chosen successor. Roosevelt felt certain that Taft, his friend and confidant, would continue his progressive reforms. Instead, in one case President, Taft aligned himself with Republican conservatives and businessmen, appointed few progressives, raised tariffs instead of lowering them, and fired Roosevelt'south friend Gifford Pinchot, the nation's main forester and a leading conservationist. Enraged, Roosevelt ran against Taft as a third-party candidate in 1912.
Taft, never comfortable as a politician, gave almost no campaign speeches after his re-nomination, golfed oftentimes, and resigned himself to defeat. He finished third in the presidential election, behind winner Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt, winning less than 25 percent of the popular vote and only 8 electoral votes. Taft called his defeat "not only a landslide but a tidal wave and holocaust all rolled into one full general cataclysm."
Relieved and happy to exist gratuitous of the presidency's burdens, Taft spent the next 8 years every bit a professor of constitutional police at Yale, gave speeches across the land, served on the National War Labor Board during World State of war I, and assisted Wilson with his failed campaign to convince the United States to join the League of Nations. "Being a dead politician, I have become a statesman," he quipped.
As chief justice, Taft rejoiced in his reversal of fortune. On the demote, wrote journalist William Allen White, he resembled "one of the loftier gods of the world, a grin Buddha, placid, wise, gentle, sugariness." To manage his declining health and reduce his famous girth, Taft walked three miles to work at the Supreme Court's chamber in the U.S. Capitol building. Soon he was down to 260 pounds, a nearly-low for him. He rarely looked dorsum at his years as a politician, except to bid them good riddance. "The strain, the worry, the craving for mere opportunity to sleep without interruption, the flabbiness of one's vocal cords," he recalled in a sympathetic October 1924 letter to John Davis, the Autonomous candidate for president, "the necessity for always being in a expert humor, and the obligation to smile when ane would similar to swear all come back to me."
As master justice, Taft expanded federal power more than he did during his cautious term in the White House. Taft the president had embraced a narrow view of his ain powers, hesitating to human activity if the law or Constitution didn't give him explicit permission. But in the most important and lasting opinion he wrote equally chief justice, in Myers vs. U.Southward., he upheld the president'southward power to dismiss federal officials without the Senate's approving. And legal challenges to his presidential legacy were rare: Just once did he recuse himself over a conflict, when a murderer whose death sentence he commuted sued for freedom.
That doesn't mean his time as chief justice didn't tie in to his presidency, though. The Taft court extended the bourgeois legacy he'd developed as president. Taft usually voted to uphold limitations on government's power to regulate businesses, about famously when he struck downward a castigating tax on companies that used child labor. There were exceptions: he voted to uphold an Oregon law that created a x-60 minutes maximum work 24-hour interval for women, and he dissented from a determination that struck down a minimum wage for female workers. A longtime foe of labor unions, Taft wrote a decision in Truax v. Corrigan that gave judges broad latitude to result injunctions to end labor disputes.
Taft had opposed Prohibition before it passed in 1919 during the Wilson Administration, thinking it'd exist hard to enforce. However, as master justice he consistently approved strict enforcement of anti-liquor laws, fifty-fifty when it put him at odds with his wife. On the a 1922 trip to London, Helen Taft and the U.S. administrator to England drank beer, while the master justice and the ambassador's wife stuck to crackers, cheese and fruit.
Taft's support for the nation's dry laws led to peradventure his nearly controversial civil-liberties decision. In 1928, Taft delivered the courtroom's opinion in Olmstead v. U.S., a five-four decision that allowed warrantless wiretaps of phone conversations to exist used against defendants. The decision caused a national uproar – The Outlook, a leading magazine of the time, called information technology "the Dred Scott conclusion of Prohibition" -- merely Taft dismissed its critics in a letter to a friend. "If they think we are going to be frightened in our endeavour to stand past the police and give the public a take chances to punish criminals, they are mistaken, even though nosotros are condemned for lack of high ideals," he wrote.
Progressives establish the Taft courtroom frustrating, its hostility to social-reform legislation tragic. "Since 1920 the Court has invalidated more legislation than in fifty years preceding," complained Felix Frankfurter, the Harvard professor and future Supreme Courtroom justice, in 1930. Decades later, Justice Antonin Scalia praised Taft's chief justiceship, fifty-fifty though many of his decision "ran counter to the ultimate sweep of history." Olmstead, for instance, was overturned in 1967, and Taft's rulings for business and against regulation and unions were overruled within years of his expiry. "Taft," Scalia wrote, "had a quite accurate 'vision of things to come,' did not like them, and did his best, with consummate skill but ultimate lack of success, to alter the outcome."
Still, Taft left a more enduring judicial legacy: He permanently increased the Supreme Court's power and prestige. When he joined the Court, its docket was mired in a backlog up to five years deep. Lobbying as no principal justice had before, Taft convinced Congress to pass the Judges' Bill of 1925, which gave the Supreme Courtroom greater control over its docket. It took away most all automated rights of appeal to the court, which allowed the justices to focus on of import constitutional questions. Taft also convinced Congress to fund the structure of a Supreme Court building, so the justices could move out of the dreary Old Senate Chamber and their even drearier conference room in the Capitol's basement. Though Taft didn't live to encounter it open in 1935, the grand building reflects its independence from the other branches of government.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor chosen Taft a "great Chief Justice…who deserves almost equally much credit as [John] Marshall for the Courtroom's modernistic-24-hour interval role only who does not often receive the recognition." She noted that 84 per centum of the Taft courtroom's opinions were unanimous–a reflection of his attempts to craft opinions that kept the nine justices together. "Virtually dissents," Taft said, "are a course of egotism. They don't exercise any expert, and only weaken the prestige of the court."
By one estimate, Taft prevented about 200 dissenting votes through diverse forms of persuasion, both carrots and sticks. In nine years, Taft himself wrote 249 opinions for the court, dissented only nearly 20 times, and wrote just 4 written dissents. He would be frustrated to run across how many dissenting opinions from his era, especially past liberal justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, are celebrated in history. But his goal in pushing for unanimity, notes O'Connor, was to build up the court'due south potency as an "expounder of national principle" – the part it still plays today.
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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/chief-justice-not-president-was-william-howard-tafts-dream-job-180961279/
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