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The Lost History of FDR's Court-Packing Scandal
BLUF:[Politico] FDR’s court-packing battle is one of the best-known constitutional struggles in U.S. history. The story, as it’s often been told, pits an entrenched, reactionary Supreme Court, which overturned a slew of Roosevelt’s New Deal economic reforms, against a hubristic president willing to take the unprecedented step of asking Congress to appoint six new, and sympathetic, justices to the bench. Only a national outcry against this unconstitutional skulduggery, along with a newly cowed court that began upholding Roosevelt’s laws, stopped the plan. Yet this narrative gets much of the court-packing episode wrong. New research I have conducted, forthcoming in the Journal of American History, demonstrates that Roosevelt saw his plan in the context of a long tradition of judicial reform, not as a departure from it. FDR wanted to encourage older justices to retire, not to add extra justices to the bench. He saw a recent, although now nearly forgotten, law cutting Supreme Court pensions as preventing retirements and thus appointments that were his due. The court-packing episode was partially an attempt to fix retirement issues‐not a mere presidential power grab. And at the time, at least at first, many in the press and public agreed with him. Today, those looking to reform the Supreme Court might want to look away from court packing and instead consider the seemingly mundane issue of judicial retirement‐and how it has reshaped the court throughout its history. A new SCOTUS retirement plan might just be the best way to protect the court’s independence from the hyperpartisanship of our times. Posted by: Besoeker 2019-02-25 |
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