Richard A. Posner: Maybe It Wouldn't Have Been So Bad if Roosevelt Packed the Supreme Court
In 1937 President Roosevelt tried to “pack” the Supreme Court--increase its size so that he could fill the vacancies thus created with liberals, who would shift the balance of power from the conservative majority that had invalidated a number of New Deal laws. Surprisingly--considering the overwhelming margin by which Roosevelt had been re-elected in 1936, the Democrats’ lock on both houses of Congress, and the pertinacity with which he pushed his plan--the Court-packing bill never even came to a vote.
This episode, I would guess, is known to few Americans, and interests still fewer--mainly students of the Supreme Court. It is therefore surprising that in 2010 a book of more than six hundred pages should appear written not by a law professor or an academic historian but by a speechwriter for President Clinton, and aimed at a popular audience, though its seventy-two pages of notes and bibliography attest to the depth of the author’s scholarship. It is still more surprising that Jeff Shesol’s book should be timely, for the light it casts on the politics of our current economic situation and on the situation itself. The book is also splendid to read. It will fascinate anyone who is interested in Roosevelt, the New Deal, the 1930s, Congress, the presidency, the Great Depression, judges, the Supreme Court, or constitutional law....
[Various New Deal laws] were invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1935 and 1936, though not because they were economically counterproductive. The Court opposed them because they delegated too much legislative power to the executive branch (that was the main ground on which the Recovery Act was invalidated), or because they exceeded Congress’s power to regulate commerce (for example because agriculture and mining were deemed local)....
Roosevelt was distressed by the Court’s elimination of New Deal programs, but less because of the specific programs than because of what the decisions portended for the rest of the New Deal legislative program. The Court’s grounds seemed likely to doom the entire remaining agenda, which included the union-friendly Wagner Act, wages and hours legislation, social security, consumer protection, prohibition of child labor, and much else besides. The Court seemed determined to prevent the growth of federal power that Roosevelt thought essential to economic recovery, social justice, and (given the growing prestige of totalitarian regimes in the 1930s) the survival of democracy. In fact, aside from the four measures that Roosevelt had taken immediately upon assuming office, the New Deal program was more likely to impede than promote recovery. But it was a response to powerful political pressures, and a failure to yield to them could have rent the nation’s political and social fabric....
Although the average age of the Supreme Court justices in January 1937, when Roosevelt’s second term began and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress was sworn in, was seventy-one, there was no indication of imminent vacancies among the five justices who had voted most consistently to invalidate New Deal statutes. Given the potential for political instability and social unrest if the entire New Deal program was killed, Roosevelt was right to strike at the Court, especially as he had a more sensible conception of the Constitution than that of the conservative justices then, or their counterparts now, or of liberal justices beginning with the Warren Court of the 1960s--a conception of a Constitution flexible enough to permit the government to meet the needs of modern society that the Framers of the Constitution could not have foreseen.
The plan, which did not require a constitutional amendment to enact because the Constitution does not fix the size of the Supreme Court, was to enlarge the Court as follows: if a justice declined to retire within six months after reaching the age of seventy (as he could do at full pay), a new justice could be appointed. The maximum size of the Court was to be fifteen. Six of the justices were over seventy, so if all declined to retire, the Court would reach its maximum size....
I said that Shesol’s book was timely. Like Franklin Roosevelt, Barack Obama is an ambitious and charismatic liberal who took over from a discredited conservative administration and a demoralized Republican Party at a time of severe economic stress. Like Roosevelt, he is passionately hated in some quarters and the subject of vicious, groundless rumors. As with Roosevelt, the election that brought him to power created strong Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, yet also like Roosevelt he faces a politically conservative Supreme Court that is more than willing to invalidate state and federal laws that it does not like.
Then as now, bankers, who “just a few years earlier had been second to no one in prestige and self-regard,” saw “the world they knew ... turned on its head.” Then as now, a liberal president was attacked from the left as well as from the right, “taking heat from liberals for the big-business orientation of the New Deal, for siding frequently with industry against the claims of labor and consumers.”
Also like Roosevelt, Obama has a three-track legislative program. The first track is recovery from depression and includes the auto and bank bailouts, and the $787 billion stimulus package, and the stress tests of the banks, and mortgage relief, and a moderate inflation--all recovery measures that resemble Roosevelt’s. The second track (illustrated in the Roosevelt administration by federal deposit insurance, the separation of commercial from investment banking, and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission) is financial regulatory reform designed to prevent a recurrence of the conditions that caused the depression. The third is long-term socio-economic reform....
Like Roosevelt, Obama is trying to shift the line between government and business leftward. He already has done so to a degree, in the auto bailouts, the banker pay caps, the credit card law, the stimulus law, and the mortgage-relief law. He wants to go further. Will he at some point collide with the Supreme Court? It is not impossible, though I think it unlikely. The current Court, the most conservative since 1937, with four very conservative justices, four liberal ones, and a moderate conservative (Kennedy) occupying the Hughes-Roberts swing position, has backtracked on the broad New Deal understanding of federal power to regulate interstate commerce and has invalidated federal statutes with something approaching abandon--forty between 1991 and 2009, compared to only twenty-nine between 1918 and 1936....
Would it really have been so terrible had the Court-packing bill passed? I am not so sure. It would have increased turnover on the Court, reduced the average age of justices, made an appointment to the Court less prestigious, and made the justices more cautious about bucking strong political forces, because they would have learned that Congress was willing as well as able to rein them in. We would probably have been spared the excesses of the Warren Court, which turned Roosevelt’s idea of the “living Constitution” on its head: where Roosevelt wanted the Court to stand aside so that the government could deal with the distinctive problems of modernity, the Warren Court responded to the surging crime rates of the 1950s and 1960s by increasing the rights of criminals.