U.S. Supreme Court CARTER v. CARTER COAL CO., 298 U.S. 238 (1936)

[Page 298 U.S. 238, 330]

Reardon, 204 U.S. 152, 160, 161 S., 27 S.Ct. 188, 9 Ann.Cas. 736; Premier-Pabst Sales Co. v. Grosscup (May 18, 1936) , 56 S. Ct. 754, 80 L.Ed. --.

(2) The commerce clause being accepted as a sufficient source of power, the next inquiry must be whether the power has been exercised consistently with the Fifth Amendment. In the pursuit of that inquiry, Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502, 54 S.Ct. 505, 89 A.L.R. 1469, lays down the applicable principle. There a statute of New York prescribing a minimum price for milk was upheld against the objection that price-fixing was forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment. [Footnote 1] We found it a sufficient reason to uphold the challenged system that 'the conditions or practices in an industry make unrestricted competition an inadequate safeguard of the consumer's interests, produce waste harmful to the public, threaten ultimately to cut off the supply of a commodity needed by the public, or portend the destruction of the industry itself.' 291 U.S. 502, at page 538, 54 S.Ct. 505, 516, 89 A.L.R. 1469.

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handful. Wages came down along with prices and with profits. There were strikes, at times nation-wide in extent, at other times spreading over broad areas and many mines, with the accompaniment of violence and bloodshed and misery and bitter feeling. The sordid tale is unfolded in many a document and treatise. During the twenty-three years between 1913 and 1935, there were nineteen investigations or hearings by Congress or by specially created commissions with reference to conditions in the coal mines. [Footnote 2] The hope of betterment was faint unless the industry could be subjected to the compulsion of a code. In the weeks immediately preceding the passage of this act the country was threatened once more with a strike of ominous proportions. The plight of the industry was not merely a menace to owners and to mine workers, it was and had long been a menace to the public, deeply concerned in a steady and uniform supply of a fuel so vital to the national economy.

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United States, , 56 S.Ct. 629, March 30, 1936. There is testimony in these records, testimony even by the assailants of the statute, that only through a system of regulated prices can the industry be stabilized and set upon the road of orderly and peaceful progress. [Footnote 3] If further facts are looked for, they are narrated in the findings as well as in Congressional Reports and a mass of public records. 4 After making every allowance for difference of opinion as to the most efficient cure, the student of the subject is confronted with the indisputable truth that there were ills to be corrected, and ills that had a direct relation to the maintenance of commerce among the states without friction or diversion. An evil existing, and also the power to correct it, the lawmakers were at liberty to use their own discretion in the selection of the means. [Footnote 5]

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sions of part 2 will be continuously operative, and will determine prices in the industry. Plainly, then, there was no intention on the part of the framers of the statute that prices should not be fixed if the provisions for wages or hours of labor were found to be invalid.

Undoubtedly the rules as to labor relations are important provisions of the statute. Undoubtedly the lawmakers were anxious that provisions so important should have the force of law. But they announced with all the directness possible for words that they would keep what they could have if they could not have the whole. Stabilizing prices would go a long way toward stabilizing labor relations by giving the producers capacity to pay a living wage. [Footnote 6] To hold otherwise is to ignore the whole history of mining. All in vain have offici l committees

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doubtful as to the validity of some of its requirements, there is thus complete protection. If this might otherwise be uncertain, it would be made clear by our decision in Ex parte Young, , 28 S.Ct. 441, 13 L.R.A.(N.S.) 932, 14 Ann.Cas. 764, which was applied in the court below at the instance and for the benefit of one of these complainants to give relief against penalties accruing during suit. Helvering v. Carter, No. 651. Finally, the adequacy of the remedial devices is made even more apparent when one remembers that the attack upon the statute in its labor regulations assumes the existence of a controversy that may never become actual. The failure to agree upon a wage scale or upon maximum hours of daily or weekly labor may make the statutory scheme abortive in the very phases and aspects that the court has chosen to condemn. What the code will provide as to wages and hours of labor, or whether it will provide anything, is still in the domain of prophecy. The opinion of the Court begins at the wrong end. To adopt a homely form of words, the complainants have been crying before they are really hurt.

My vote is for affirmance.

I am authorized to state that Mr. Justice BRANDEIS and Mr. Justice STONE join in this opinion. Footnotes

Footnote 1 Hamilton v. Kentucky Distilleries Co., 251 U.S. 146, 156, 40 S.Ct. 106, 108: 'The war power of the United States, like its other powers and like the police power of the states, is subject to applicable constitutional limitations (Ex parte Milligan, 4 Wall. 2, 121- 127; Monongahela Navigation Co. v. United States, 148 U.S. 312, 336, 13 S.Ct. 622; United States v. Joint-Traffic Ass'n, 171 U.S. 505, 571, 19 S.Ct. 25; McCray v. United States, 195 U.S. 27, 61, 24 S.Ct. 769, 1 Ann.Cas. 561; United States v. Cress, 243 U.S. 316, 326, 37 S.Ct. 380); but the Fifth Amendment imposes in this respect no greater limitation upon the national power than does the Fourteenth Amendment upon state p wer. In re Kemmler, 136 U.S. 436, 448, 10 S.Ct. 930; Carroll v. Greenwich Ins. Co., 199 U.S. 401, 410, 26 S.Ct. 66.' Cf. Brooks v. United States, 267 U.S. 432, 436, 437 S., 45 S.Ct. 345, 37 A.L.R. 1407; Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502, 524, 54 S.Ct. 505, 89 A.L. R. 1469.

Footnote 2 The dates and titles are given in the brief for the government in No. 636, at pp. 15-18.

Footnote 3 See, also, the Report of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the National Coal Association, October 26-27, 1934, and the statement of the resolutions adopted at the Sixteenth Annual Meeting as reported at hearings preliminary to the passage of this act. Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, 74th Congress, 1st Session, on H.R. 8479, pp. 20, 152.

Footnote 4 There is significance in the many bills proposed to the Congress after painstaking reports during successive nat onal administrations with a view to the regulation of the coal industry by Congressional action. S. 2557, October 4, 1921, 67th Cong., 1st Sess.; S. 3147, February 13, 1922, 67th Cong., 2nd Sess.; H.R. 9222, February 11, 1926, 69th Cong., 1st Sess.; H.R. 11898, May 4, 1926 (S. 4177), 69th Cong., 1st Sess.; S. 2935, January 7, 1932 (H.R. 7536), 72nd Cong., 1st Sess.; also same session H.R. 12916 and 9924.

Footnote 5 'Price control, like any other form of regulation, is unconstitutional only if arbitrary, discriminatory, or demonstrably irrelevant to the policy the Legislature is free to adopt, and hence an unnecessary and unwarranted interference with individual liberty.' Nebbia v. New York, supra, , at page 538, 54 S.Ct. 505, 517, 89 A.L.R. 1469.

Footnote 6 At a hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, 74th Congress, First Session, on H.R. 8479, counsel for the United Mine Workers of America, who had coo perated in the drafting of the Act, said (p. 35):'We have, as can be well understood, a provision of this code dealing with labor relations at the mines. We think that is justified; we think it is impossible to conceive of any regulation of this industry that does not provide for regulation of labor relations at the mines. I realize that while it may be contested, yet I feel that it is going to be sustained.'Also, there is a provision in this act that if this act, or any part of it, is declared to be invalid as affecting any person or persons, the rest of it will be valid, and if the other provisions of this act still stand and the labor provisions are struck down, we still want the act, because it stabilizes the industry and enables us to negotiate with them on a basis which will at least be different from what we have been confronted with since April, and that is a disinclination to even negotiate a labor wage scale because they claim they are losing money.'If the labor provisions go down, we still want the industry stabilized so that our union may negotiate with them on the basis of a living American wage standard.'

Footnote 7 5(c); 'Any producer whose membership in the code and whose right to a drawback on the taxes as provided under this Act has been canceled, shall have the right to have his membership restored upon payment by him of all taxes in full for the time during which it shall be found by the Commission that his violation of the code or of any regulation thereunder, the observance of which is required by its terms, shall have continued. In making its findings under this subsection the Commission shall state specifically (1) the period of time during which such violation continued, and (2) the amount of taxes required to be paid to bring about reinstatement as a code member.'

6(b): 'Any person aggrieved by an order issued by the Commission or Labor Board in a proceeding to which such person is a party may obtain a review of such order in the Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States, within any circuit wherein such person resides or has his principal place of business, or in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, by filing in such court, within sixty days after the entry of such order, a written petition praying that the order of the Commission or Labor Board be modified or set aside in whole or in part. ... The judgment and decree of the court, affirming, modifying, and enforcing or setting aside, in whole or in part, any such order of the Commission or Labor Board, as the case may be, shall be final, subject to review by the Supreme Court of the United States upon certiorari or certification as provided in sections 239 and 240 of the Judicial Code, as amended ( sections 346 and 347 of Title 28).'