Courts Peril Democracy, Argues Former New Deal Official
Donald Richberg, a former official with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, called the federal courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, a “peril” to democracy and the ability of the federal government to cope with the nation’s social and political needs. He accused the courts of using “dry as dust legalism” to “bury” needed legislation.
Richberg’s remarks were prompted by the constitutional crisis of the mid-1930s when the Supreme Court had invalidated New Deal legislation designed to address the Depression. The Court ruled that federal economic regulation violated the “liberty of contract” under the Fourteenth Amendment.
In response to this crisis, President Roosevelt 0n February 5, 1937 famously proposed his famous (or infamous) “court-packing” plan that would allow him to expand the size of the court by appointing new justices to the Supreme Court for judges who were 70 years and 6 months old or older. The Judicial Procedures Reform Act of 1937 immediately met with strong opposition and was rejected by Congress.
As the “court-packing” plan was being debated in Congress, the Supreme Court reversed itself on March 29, 1937 and upheld the constitutionality of federal and state economic regulation. Seeing that they no longer commanded a majority on the court, the elderly and conservative justices began to retire, giving Roosevelt the opportunity to appoint a series of Justices who were not only sympathetic to economic regulation but also to civil liberties.His appointments included two of the most famous civil libertarians ever to serve on the court: Hugo Black and William O. Douglas.
The resulting “Roosevelt Court” established the first significant body of civil liberties law in the history of the Court and laid a foundation for the pro-civil liberties Warren Court (1954-1968) under Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Learn more about Roosevelt’s conflict with the Supreme Court: Marian C. McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War: The Court-packing Crisis of 1937 (2002)
Read about Roosevelt’s “court-packing” plan here
Learn more: Peter Irons, A People’s History of the Supreme Court (1999)