In public, President Roosevelt initially asserted that the Court reform was designed to promote judicial efficiency. The Supreme Court, he argued, needed additional and younger personnel to handle its growing caseload.[28] But Roosevelt soon acknowledged that the real purpose was to alter the future course of the Court’s decisions.[29] In his Fireside Chat on March 9, 1937, the President urged that “new blood” was needed, because the Supreme Court was “acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body” in invalidating New Deal programs.[30] “[W]e must take action to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself,”[31] he proclaimed.
In congressional testimony, executive officials defended the plan as a constitutional and desirable method of Court reform. Then-Assistant Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson argued that “[o]ur forebears” placed certain mechanisms in the Constitution to “enable Congress to check judicial abuses and usurpations.”[32] One of those checks was the power of Congress to alter the size of the Supreme Court. Jackson insisted that Congress had throughout the nineteenth century changed the Court’s size “to keep the divergence between the Court and the elective branches from becoming so wide as to threaten the stability of the Government.”[33] Jackson declared: “When immediate and effective action has been necessary” to prevent the judiciary from “impos[ing] … its unsympathetic predilections on the country,” “the method which the President now proposes has been used throughout our constitutional history.”[34]
Some modern observers assume that Roosevelt’s proposal was quickly rejected.[35] But at least in Congress, that appears not to have been the case. To be sure, the plan faced considerable opposition from Roosevelt’s fellow Democrats (notably, at a time when the Democrats controlled over 70% of the seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate)[36] and prompted widespread media condemnation.[37] Some opponents saw the plan as an effort to consolidate presidential control over the judiciary and “compar[ed] Roosevelt to Stuart tyrants and European dictators.”[38] Chief Justice Hughes sent a letter to Senator Burton Wheeler which sought to refute President Roosevelt’s initial claim that enlarging the Court would improve judicial efficiency. The Chief Justice argued that “[a]n increase in the number of Justices … would impair that efficiency so long as the Court acts as a unit. There would be more judges to hear, more judges to confer, more judges to discuss, more judges to be convinced and to decide. The present number of Justices is thought to be large enough so far as the prompt, adequate, and efficient conduct of the work of the Court is concerned.”[39]
But there was also considerable support in Congress for Roosevelt’s plan, and many in Congress expected throughout much of the debate that the legislation would succeed in some
