Baker-v-Carr

The movement claim that the Supreme Court shielded the legal-tender question from constitutional review by characterizing it as 'political and administrative' is unsupported

Byron Beers's Treatise #1 reads Knox v. Lee, 79 U.S. 287 (1871), as containing language characterizing the legal-tender question as 'political and administrative, and not judicial' — and reads the language as evidence that the Court used the political-question doctrine to avoid ruling on the constitutionality of paper currency. The reading inverts what Knox v. Lee actually did. The Court did not duck the constitutional question; it resolved the question on the merits in favor of paper-currency authority under the Necessary and Proper Clause. The political-question doctrine — which is a real and active doctrine — has never been applied to legal-tender authority by the Supreme Court, and the doctrinal posture of Knox v. Lee is the opposite of political-question abstention. A supporting cite to American Ins. Co. v. 356 Bales of Cotton, 26 U.S. 511, 544 (1828), for a definition of political questions as 'relations between people and their sovereign' could not be verified at primary source and is doctrinally weak — Canter is principally about Article I/III tribunal classification, not political-question doctrine.