Court packing divided Democrats and undermined middle-class and bipartisan support for the New Deal. It shattered FDR’s aura of invincibility, helped “blunt the most important drive for social reform in American history,” and “squandered” the president’s 1936 triumph by welding together a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans that blocked reform in Congress until 1964.[151]
Other commentators contend, however, that the plan in fact achieved some of its objectives. The Supreme Court’s constitutional doctrine did undergo changes in 1937, and certain of those changes proved enduring. That spring, the Court began upholding major pieces of New Deal legislation, despite challenges that the statutes exceeded Congress’s Article I powers—in particular, the commerce power and the taxing and spending power. Roosevelt did not succeed in “packing” the Court, but neither did he have to abandon his New Deal agenda. Nor did he have to launch an effort for a constitutional amendment to limit the Court’s power, as some in his administration had urged.[152]
Scholars disagree regarding both the magnitude and the causes of these doctrinal shifts. The Justices might well have viewed the Court-packing plan as a threat and altered their views accordingly, engaging in “self-salvation by self-reversal.”[153] On this view, “[w]hile the president lost the skirmish with the Court, he won the battle.”[154] Gradual shifts in specific Justices’ doctrinal approaches might explain the Court’s shift in 1937.[155] The New Deal “did not reconstruct constitutional law out of thin air.”[156] But “the doctrinal revolution would not have happened without sustained Presidential leadership.”[157] Clearly, the struggle over the Court “exacted an enormous toll” on Roosevelt and impeded the legislative momentum for comprehensive economic and social reform. Yet, as one leading historian of the era notes, these costs “should not obscure the President’s one huge success in the Court fight—the legitimation of a vast expansion of the power of government in American life.”[158]
The public debate surrounding the President’s plan placed undeniable pressure on the Court in the late winter and spring of 1937. More than twenty-five bills regulating the Court were introduced in Congress between January 8 and May 20, 1937.[159] Justice Owen Roberts, the Justice whom many conventional accounts of the crisis identify as switching his views in 1937, recalled years later, in testimony before the Senate, “the tremendous strain and the threat to the existing Court, of which I was fully conscious.”[160]
