Court Packing Plan Essay

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On February 5, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced a plan to expand the Supreme Court. The Judicial Reorganization Bill, also dubbed the “court-packing plan,” aimed to create a majority on the high court that would presumably be more favorable to the New Deal programs that the administration was attempting to institute. The acts and programs that President Roosevelt presented during his first administration ran into great hostility from the Supreme Court, which overturned several New Deal programs in the first few years. With important pieces of legislation dealing with social security and other public welfare programs still on the agenda, President Roosevelt and his advisors looked for a way to shift the balance of power within …show more content…

While his motivations for doing so had the general welfare of the nation in mind, Roosevelt could have risked turning the judiciary into another political branch. If the Court Packing plan had succeeded the Constitutional Revolution that took place during this time would have taken a whole other meaning. Although Roosevelt still received a victory as the Supreme Court eventually began supporting pieces of New Deal legislation, the defeat of the plan still served as a victory for the independence of the federal judiciary and the principle of separation of …show more content…

Trump has not yet called for a radical piece of legislation that would change the composition of the court to the degree of the Court Packing plan. Moreover, President Roosevelt’s purpose behind the court packing plan was to nominate more judges that would in theory be more open to the administration’s New Deal programs. While some of these programs were poorly conceived and did have some constitutional deficiencies, many well written acts were still struck down because the conservative bloc of the Court refused to move past its arcane beliefs surrounding the Freedom of Contract. This was a completely different set of circumstances from those that Trump experienced when he chose to berate the judges for striking down the ban. However, there are some striking similarities between president Roosevelt’s statements during his fireside chat and Trump’s

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