Content Section The 1934 Dinner Party That May Have Helped Save Obamacare

Jonathan Alter, author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One, is a columnist for Bloomberg View and an analyst for MSNBC. He worked at Newsweek for 28 years as a senior editor and columnist.

Could a 1934 Washington dinner party hold the key to Chief Justice John Roberts’ landmark decision on the Affordable Care Act?

In late 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been in office more than a year and decided to move forward on what would become his greatest domestic achievement: Social Security. He assigned his secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, the first woman ever to serve in the Cabinet, to lead the way on designing the program.

But Perkins was worried. The Supreme Court was moving toward a narrow interpretation of the Commerce Clause that would invalidate many of the great achievements of the New Deal. Soon that would include the National Recovery Act, the capstone of FDR’s famous First Hundred Days in 1933.

(It would be another four years before Justice Owen Roberts—no relation—would famously switch sides and the Court would begin reversing itself, partly in response to FDR’s 1937 “court packing” scheme.)...