Responses and Reversals. Studies of congressional responses to Court decisions have identified a multitude of factors that affect the probability that Congress will respond to a Court decision and that those responses will be successful. Notably absent from these works are analyses of the substance of responsive legislation. Accordingly, claims that Congress can and frequently does reverse the constitutional decisions of the Court are premature. The bulk of empir- ical research on congressional responses to the Court’s decision in political science has favored large sample quantitative analyses that do not lend themselves to careful inves- tigation of individual cases. These studies focus almost exclusively on policy outcomes. Legal scholars, on the other hand, have adopted case–study approaches to consider the impact of individual attempts by Congress to dictate constitutional policy but have not prioritized the identification of generalizable patterns. I pursue an approach that treads the middle–ground between these extremes by compiling a sample that is large enough to allow the use of statistical techniques to test causal hypotheses but small enough that I can also analyze the substance of individual responsive proposals and the court cases that they engender when they are successful. I assess the hypothesis that Congress is able to reverse the constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court by considering the intended ef- fects of responsive bills on the legal holdings announced by the Court and on the Court’s policy outcomes. Conventional wisdom holds that reversal of the Supreme Court’s constitutional de- cisions can only be achieved through a constitutional amendment. Xxxxxxx & Xxxxxxx (1997), on the other hand, conclude that Congress can and frequently does reverse the constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court through the passage of ordinary legisla- tion. Many scholars, while not going as far as Xxxxxxx & Xxxxxxx (1997), believe it is permissible and possible for Congress to modify the impact of Supreme Court decisions through the passage of ordinary legislation (Xxxxxxx 1984, Xxxxxx 1990). Xxxxxxx (1984, 126) suggests that Congress can force reconsideration of issues of constitutional law by passing legislation in response to the constitutional decisions of the Court. Xxxxxxx & Xxxxxxx (1997, 451) summarize the potential forms of these responses: Congress may rewrite legislation to pass judicial scrutiny; it may rewrite leg- islation to locate the sources of its power...
