Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States
form.[40] Democratic Senate Majority Leader Joe Robinson pushed hard for Court expansion, with the enthusiastic support of many other Democrats, including then-Senator (and later Supreme Court Justice) Hugo Black.[41] Initially, the measure seemed likely to get through the Senate, and many participants assumed that it would pass the House of Representatives by a wide margin.[42]
The political debate, which took place in the halls of Congress, across the editorial pages, and in numerous local venues throughout the country, was then significantly affected by the Supreme Court itself. Soon after the plan was announced, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions upholding state and federal regulation of the economy.[43] Although scholars disagree as to why the Supreme Court changed its approach,[44] there is no question that this apparent “switch in time” in the spring of 1937 dampened the congressional support for the President’s plan. The Court’s decisions signaled that it might be more receptive to New Deal programs, even absent a change in membership.[45]
In June 1937, the Senate Judiciary Committee, voting 10 to 8, issued a strongly worded report recommending against the plan.[46] The majority of the Committee denounced Roosevelt’s plan as “a needless, futile, and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle.”[47] The bill was “an attempt to impose upon the courts … a line of decision” and thus “would undermine the independence of the courts.”[48] The report declared:
Let us now set a salutary precedent that will never be violated. Let us, of the Seventy-fifth Congress, in words that will never be disregarded by any succeeding Congress, declare that we would rather have an independent Court, a fearless Court, a Court that will dare to announce its honest opinions in what it believes to be the defense of liberties of the people, than a Court that, out of fear or sense of obligation to the appointing power or factional passion, approves any measure we may enact.[49]
Neither the Court’s decisions upholding New Deal legislation nor this vociferous criticism in Congress ended debate over the Court-packing plan in Congress. Considerable support for some type of Court expansion remained, and some historians contend that the harsh rebuke by the Judiciary Committee backfired by leading some Democrats, who thought the attack intemperate, to support the administration.[50] And it appeared for a time that Congress in fact would authorize the President to appoint four additional Justices (one for every member over age seventy-five).[51] It was not until after additional debates—and the sudden death of the bill’s staunch proponent Senate Majority Leader Robinson—that political support for the measure finally ran out, with the defeat of the plan in July 1937.[52]
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