Dictatorship, I say!
2-10-1937: Texas State Senator TJ Holbrook: “It is the purpose of the President to eliminate from the governmental structure one of its foundation stones and to place the Supreme Court under his power. If the plan should be adopted, it would destroy the government and establish a dictatorship equal to that of Hitler or Mussolini. Throughout the ages we have many examples of governments wrecked by these methods.”
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2-9, Letter to the Editor Elmer Davis: The last election may not have been a mandate for any particular alteration of the judiciary, but it certainly was a general mandate to catch up with the times, to make social and industrial reforms which other capitalist democracies made years ago. In the next four years, we have an opportunity for orderly and moderate reform; if they are blocked by technicalities, as orderly and moderate reforms so often were in the later years of the Roman Republic, what happens thereafter may be less moderate and less orderly. Men of property ought to be the first to insist that we do our reforming now.
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A. Lawrence Lowell, President Emeritus of Harvard: “In the Declaration of Independence, one of the charges against George III was that he has made judges dependent on his will alone for tenure of their offices, and by the Constitution our forebears provided that no one should be able to do anything of the kind again in this land of ours, at least they attempted to do so. Are we now to return to the claim of the Stuart Kings that judges should be lions under their throne?”
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Dean E Clark, Yale Law School: Urging support of amendments proposed by the Liberal Party, he said that President Roosevelt’s plan, while it might have the immediate result of saving a few pieces of legislation, would be at long range only a retirement and pension scheme. Failure to liberalize the Constitution would bring “absolute government” because the way to dictatorship is much more nearly in the way of refusing to change in line with the times than any of the other courses now open.
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Herbert Hoover, 2-21: “If Mr Roosevelt can change the constitution to suit his purposes by adding to the members of the Court, any succeeding President can do it to suit his purposes. If a troop of ‘President’s Judges’ can be sent into the halls of justice to capture political power, than his successors with the same device can also send a new troop of ‘President’s Judges’ to capture some new power. That is not judicial power. That is force. In less than a score of years, the courts in a dozen nations have been made subjective to political power, and with this subjection, the people’s securities in those countries have gone out the window. And mark you this: In every instance the persuaders have professed to be acting for the people in the name of progress. As we watch the parade of nations go down that suicide road, every American has cause to be anxious for our Republic.”
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2-12: Governor Earle (D) of Pennsylvania declared tongight that “the cause of human welfare has been advanced beyond calculation by President Roosevelt’s proposal to break the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.”
“Lincoln faced the problem of a Supreme Court assuming more than its rightful powers. He fought it bitterly. He put an additional member on it. The Supreme Court needs change. President Roosevelt is going to do it, and the people are going to support him. I hope hereafter we can maintain not government by one supreme court justice who casts the deciding vote in 5-4 decisions, but government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’. This we cannot do with the court of present constituted.”
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2-10: The far seeing men who fashioned our Constitution and established our government 150 years ago provided a system of checks and balances which should insure the perpetuity of the government.[…]
This system worked perfectly until 1933. Then the President demanded and received from Congress extraordinary powers, which he has never surrendered. Congress, because of the overwhelming Democratic majority, ceased to be a deliberative body. The vast majority of members did not even read the bills submitted, much less debate them. It was enought to know the President wanted them, and they were passed without debate, and frequently even without submission to a committee. There remained then but one check upon either the Executive or Congress — The Supreme Court. Now the President proposes to “pack” this court by increasing the number of justices and filling the new vacancies with men of his own way of thinking and removing all justices over the age of 70. Both Congress and the Supreme Court would then become mere Presidential “rubber stamps.”
The function of the Supreme Court is to interpret the law. The law is a good deal older than 70 years, but under a New Deal dispensation the established law is but rightly held and must be bent and twisted to conform to New Deal requirements. Witness within the past few days the Secretary of Labor demanding of Congress that it pass “with all possible haste” an act establishing the legality of “sit down strikes.” Witness too a president demanding of Congress the passage of a certain bill with the instruction “not to be deterred by considerations of its constitutionality.” This is the blackest phrase on the records of this government.
This is the most critical moment in the history of our nation. If the President has his way and is permitted to Emasculate the Supreme Court, the US may classify itself as a nation of puppets. Was it for this that we re-elected Mr. Roosevelt by such an overwhelming majority?
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(#1): As it turned out, Governor Earle, Roosevelt was quite happy with 5-4 decisions, because he dropped the fight once the Supreme Court started making 5-4 rulings on his behalf.
(#2): Congress as a Rubber stamp. Roosevelt had huge majorities in Congress, and won by huge land-slides. What’s the current Republican Party’s (and Democratic opposition’s) excuse?
(#3): Consider Roosevelt’s creation of a Constitutional Crisis, which resolved itself in what seems like an uncomfortable Compromise that the Supreme Court behave itself, in light with the Constitutional Crisis of sorts where the Republicans threatened to get rid of the Democratic Right to Fillibuster Judges, which resolved itself when “The Gang of 14” came out and … um… agreed to behave themselves. History is full of sleights of hands masquerading as Noble Victories.
(#4): Hoover would go on to make a play for the 1940 Republican Nomination, on the basis that Hitler was going to win WWII with the US staying out of it, and he had the Business Credentials to deal with Hitler. So it’s kind of weird to hear Hoover make Hitler Comparisons.