The Final Days

Court adjourns with a flurry

The U.S. Supreme Court is an institution steeped in traditions: the round of handshakes before its conferences, the help the Justices give one another in donning robes before taking the bench and, each year, the barrage of weighty decisions during the term's final days. Sure enough, last week the court ended its nine-month session with several rulings that, while overshadowed by the Iranian assets case and the Agee passport decision, nevertheless remain significant.

The court ruled that broadcasters must give "reasonable access" to candidates for federal office who wish to advertise. The issue arose when the three major television networks turned down then President Jimmy Carter's request to purchase a 30-minute political ad in December 1979. ABC and NBC said it was too early in the campaign season, while CBS demurred because it feared that all his rivals would want to buy time and thus disrupt programming.

The dispute first went to the Federal Communications Commission. Relying on a "reasonable access" guarantee in a 1972 statute, the FCC ordered the networks to grant Carter's request. Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for a six-man majority, backed up both the FCC and the statute, which he said "represents an effort by Congress to assure that an important resource -- the air waves -- will be used in the public interest."

In another 6-3 ruling, the Justices found that Montana's 30% tax on coal, the highest such levy in the nation, was not an unacceptable burden on interstate commerce, even though most of it is shipped out of the state, and therefore was valid. After the decision, residents of energy-poor regions said they would urge Congress to establish a ceiling for such taxes.

In perhaps the most confusing decision of the term, the court struck down a San Diego ordinance banning billboards as an unconstitutional infringement of free speech because the law was too broad. In the process, however, seven Justices with differing views on the ordinance agreed that states and cities do have the right to prohibit strictly commercial billboards. A bewildered Justice William Rehnquist described his colleagues' disparate opinions as "a virtual Tower of Babel, from which no definitive principles can be clearly drawn."

It was one of the rare instances during the term when the court failed to defer to a lawmaking body. It yielded to Congress (on all-male draft registration and tough strip-mine controls), to the Executive Branch (on passport powers and strict standards for cotton dust and lead in factories) and to states (on televising trials and the double celling of prisoners). Moreover, the Justices tended to resist the temptation to write broad new rules. In short, the court has been just the sort of strict-constructionist, nonactivist body that Ronald Reagan likes.

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