I couldn’t find anything really brief on this so I will write it out, hopefully shorter:
Ketchup says, “For one thing, the emergency nature of the crisis, the lack of prior long-term planning, and the early New Deal’s flexibility meant that nothing new was really in place until the late 1930’s.” Eh, I don’t think so.
Before the New Deal, the federal government was much more limited in scope and did not make any laws it didn’t have to – states were much more independent, and the prevailing philosophy was that the federal government should have very limited powers.
As a result, the Supreme Court repeatedly struck down New Deal laws saying that the federal government was overreaching its authority. The Social Security Act was in the process of being challenged. The laws the Supreme Court were striking down were good for people.
The basic idea was that by 1936 people were pissed and re-elected Roosevelt in a landslide, and in February 1937 he proposed the above plan, known as the “Court-Packing Plan”. He proposed a law whereby he could appoint one additional Supreme Court justice for every Supreme Court Justice sitting on the court that was over the age of 70. At that point, the average age of a Supreme Court Justice was 71.
This was a good plan because then he could appoint SIX Supreme Court Justices and get them to stop screwing with his New Deal Laws. People from all walks of political life were up in arms.
This situation was a Constitutional Crisis of enormous proportions. So they say.
The Supreme Court stopped being such a hardass and stopped rolling over his laws.
However, because he was such a jerk about the whole thing, he is considered to have been less effective because of the enemies he made during that time, and many of his future plans were thwarted by Congress, by both Dems and Reps.
Because of all that craziness, it is widely considered that the New Deal really didn’t do much for the Depression, but that our entering WWII did. Most of the reason that the New Deal didn’t do much for the Depression was that after 1937 – and many previously enacted laws were struck down – he couldn’t get much done in Congress, and Congress, mostly conservatives, blocked him on loads of stuff. It seems that he only got re-elected in 1940 because of the war.
And that, my friends, concludes today’s Constitutional Crisis.
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