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Paradise Lost: The Effect Of Judicial Review On Congressional Debate, Laura E. Jenkins

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How does judicial supremacy affect constitutional deliberation in Congress? Normative critics of judicial supremacy argue that judicial supremacy warps congressional debate by disincentivizing members of Congress from independently considering the moral and legal issues at stake in legislation. As this dissertation’s quantitative analysis, topic modeling, and qualitative textual analysis show, the Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012) disincentivized members of Congress from engaging in independent constitutional interpretation and normative argumentation. Before the Supreme Court’s decision in Sebelius, members of both parties debated the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and used constitutional …