U.S. Supreme Court-Packing

FDR, the Supreme Court, and Congress in the "Court-Packing" Episode of 1937

The Great Depression of the 1930s was a central event not only in American economic history but in its political history, with echoes that continue in American political rhetoric to the present day. The Republican Party, which had held the presidency since 1920 -- and through most of the period since the American Civil War -- was swept out by the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, commonly called simply FDR, in 1932. When he entered office in 1933, he began to put into place a set of sweeping economic reforms, known collectively as the New Deal.

Despite the fact that New Deal programs had an almost immediate effect in terms of improving the lives of those Americans whose lives had been most seriously and grievously affected by the Depression, Roosevelt's policies brought about a storm of protest - not only from Republicans (although they were certainly in the majority) but also by some progressives who feared that Roosevelt was eroding important Constitutional protections that should not be compromised even under such dire economic conditions, as McKenna (2002) argues.

The American political system is characterized by the "separation of powers" between the executive, legislative, and judicial components of government, represented respectively by the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Each of the branches of government has both Constitutional and practical l

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t that time had much less prestige than they have acquired in recent years. McReynolds himself, though he had initially come to Washington as a reformer, was a notoriously disagreeable, bigoted and imperious personality and an unreconstructed son of the Old South. He had first come to Washington as a trustbuster for President Theodore Roosevelt and later was President Wilson's attorney general until his appointment to the Court in 1924. The conflict between the Roosevelt Administration and the Supreme Court broke out into the open in May of 1935, when the Court struck down two major pieces of New Deal legislation. First was the Railroad Retirement Act of 1934, which had established pensions for railroad workers. This was followed on "Black Monday," May 27 by an even more serious blow, when the Court struck down the National Recovery Act (NRA), a cornerstone of the New Deal. Because the case, Schechter v US, was brought by a chicken merchant, it came to be known as the "dead chicken" decision. Roosevelt protested that "we have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce." In January of 1936, the Court also threw out the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. In response to these judicial se

Category: History - U