When the Supreme Court strikes down an act of Congress, normative questions arise about the proper role of life-tenured, unelected judges in a democracy. Similar questions arise when lower courts strike down congressional statutes, but political science research has given considerably less attention to these decisions. Using a novel dataset of Courts of Appeals invalidations of federal legislation from 1979 to 2019, I find that any given law is more likely to be struck down at the circuit court level than at the Supreme Court level. Furthermore, most Supreme Court invalidations were preceded by an invalidation at the circuit level, and circuit court behavior strongly shapes the Supreme Court’s certiorari decisions. Thus, when theorizing about the Supreme Court’s treatment of congressional legislation, we must take into account the prior behavior of the Courts of Appeals. So doing, we gain a broader understanding of the relationship between the courts and Congress.