A look back at local, national and world events through Deseret News archives.
On this day in 1937, the U.S. Senate rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court.
According to historical accounts, in February of that year, Roosevelt shocked America by introducing a plan to expand the Supreme Court, to gain favorable votes. FDR’s war on the court was short lived, and it was defeated by a crafty chief justice and Roosevelt’s party members.
Roosevelt had enacted wide-ranging legislation along with congressional Democrats as part of his New Deal program, starting in 1933.
By 1937, Roosevelt had won a second term in office, but the makeup of a conservative-leaning Supreme Court hadn’t changed since he took office four years earlier. Four of those justices — nicknamed the “Four Horsemen”: Justices George Sutherland, a Utahn, Pierce Butler, James McReynolds and Willis Van Devanter — were conservative enough that their votes against most New Deal plans were expected. A fifth justice with conservative leanings was the chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, who also narrowly lost the 1916 presidential race to the Democratic incumbent, President Woodrow Wilson.
Adding to the tension between the president and the Supreme Court were a series of decisions by the justices that halted key components of the New Deal. After his reelection, Roosevelt developed his plan to reform the court in secrecy, working with his attorney general, Homer Cummings, on a way to ensure the court would rule favorably about upcoming cases on Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act.
The plan was to pass a law — the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 — that would allow the president to appoint an additional justice for every sitting justice who was over 70 years of age. Roosevelt could add six of his own justices to the court. With two liberals already on the bench, that would put the odds in FDR’s favor.
While the idea may seem outlandish today, Roosevelt must have felt the bill stood a good chance of success. The president used one of his famous “fireside chats” via radio on March 9 to make his case to the American people.
However, many Americans believed the high court was sacrosanct, and opposition to the plan steadily built inside Washington. It wasn’t assured that the proposed law would even make it out of committee for a vote on the Senate floor.
Within five weeks of the president’s announcement, the “court-packing plan,” as it came to be known, was heading toward a dead-end in the Senate. By June, the Judiciary Committee had sent a report with a negative recommendation to the full Senate. “The bill is an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country. ... It is essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy that the judiciary be completely independent of both the executive and legislative branches of the government,” the report read.
In the meantime, changes were afoot that made sure the whole idea of a court-packing plan wasn’t coming back in the Roosevelt administration. The Roosevelt administration was on the winning side of three court decisions involving the minimum wage, Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act. Some have argued this started when Justice Owen Roberts began voting with the more liberal justices to save the legislation, also known as “the switch in time that saved nine.”
In the end, FDR outlasted seven of the nine justices who sat on the bench in 1937.
Here are some perspective pieces from Deseret News archives on the plan and where the Supreme Court issue is today.
“Packing the Supreme Court? History shows it’s a bad idea”
“Report: President Biden expected to propose major changes to Supreme Court”
“Does the Supreme Court need to be reformed?”
“Should the Supreme Court have term limits?”
“The Supreme Court is doing its job”
Sutherland, who spent much of his early life in Utah and served in the Utah Legislature, served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court between 1922 and 1938. He died in 1942.