Fund Your Utopia Without Me.™

10 April 2012

What Did Progs Think About FDR's "Court-Packing" Scheme? - You Can't Always Get What You Want



Music to read by:




The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want




 


By William Allen White, 7 February 1937


Adroitly President Roosevelt is proposing to pack the Supreme Court.  And, because he adroit and forthright arouses irritating suspicions, probably needless, about his ultimate intentions as the leader of his party and the head of his government.  For his plan to pack the Court did not spring full panoplied from his brain in the last few weeks or the last two months.

Flouting the democratic process of open discussion, the President revealed to the American people in the long campaign no inkling of this plan.  In fact, time and again during the campaign he was charged with exactly what he is doing.

Last fall, he met the charge that he was trying to become an unconstitutional leader by berating the financial manipulators, whose powers should be properly clipped and who certainly should be personlly punished.  But while crying against these "economic royalists," he would seem to have harboured subconsciously a seven-devil lust to become an unconstitutional royalist himself.

Become A Deadly Menace

This country can take care of those who break the laws in high places.  That's comparatively easy.  But those who scorn the orderly processes of democracy, those leaders who by instinctive indirection slip around our laws and annul the basic implications of American democracy, they become a menace more deady than the economic royalists whom Roosevelt denounces.

In a world challenging democracy, in a day when tyrants, appearing as demagogues crying out against predatory wealth have shattered Europe's democratic institutions, this court message of the President's seems strangely like the first looming American symptom of danger.

It is not what the President is doing.  Most of his recommendations are sound.  At base, his most drastic proposal is at least debatable.  But the point is that this drastic proposal has had no debate before the people.  Moreover, by a power over Congress, the President will deny free debate there.

It may be wise to pack the Supreme Court.  Necessary economic change and social growth must not be choked by the Judiciary.  But how shall the Judiciary be checked?  This is a serious question.  Whose wisdom has the President consulted?

Patience A Basic Virtue

Here is a vital step down a new path amounting to a constitutional change.  We should not go dancing dizzily down there over night.  Change should come in a democracy only after a considered, organised, intelligent movement of the whole people.  No emergency justifies haste where liberties may be curtailed.  Patience is a basic virtue in any democracy.

Every change of public opinion should be definitely reflected in a growing conviction of Congress, and finally by legislation formed after amendment and debate.  But we wake up and read a Presidential ukase.  Surely, the Executive branch of the government should not take full charge of the Judicial branch of the government between hay and grass.  Surely in the long campaign last year, we should have had some warning of this specific change, which will affect our government so profoundly.  Surely, Mr Roosevelt's mandate from the people was to function as the President, not as Der Fuehrer.

Tricks In New Game

This Presidential adroitness, this uncanny capacity to avoid the direct joining of issues in full, fair and free debate, this seemingly instinctive lack of candor, this smiling assumption of courage while avoiding all danger, this elabourate stage play to flatter the people by a simulation of frankness while denying Americans their democratic rights of discussion by suave avoidance -- these traits are not the traits of a democratic leader.  These are tricks, which have been played in the new game wherein other peoples have lost their democratic liberties in other lands.  

How long with the people be fooled?


- William Allen White, the Progressive editor of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette


From Ross Kaminsky:

In the 1938 mid-term elections, Republicans gained House seats for the first time in a decade, picking up a stunning 81 seats in the House of Representatives, or 18.6 percent of that chamber. Even the Republican tsunami of 2010 only caused a GOP pickup of 63 seats, or 14.4 percent, although Republicans began the most recent mid-term elections with twice as many seats (178) as the party held during their hapless years going into 1938 (88).

 It is true that FDR won re-election in 1940, and perhaps this is the bulletin that is bouncing around inside the White House echo chamber, but FDR was far more popular than Barack Obama, and the nation was heading into war -- always an advantage for an incumbent. While Republicans remained the minority party in Congress, the 1938 landslide following FDR's court-packing scheme remains the largest gain for either party in the House of Representatives since 1894 and arguably ended any expansion of the New Deal.

Because Democrats either don't know this or don't think the lessons of history apply to them, the Obama administration has been shocked -- shocked! -- that its verbal mugging of the Court has been politically ineffective at best. Perhaps, like Obamacare itself, the administration believed that once we really understood its position, we'd come to like it better.

As usual, its projections don't reflect reality, and now the Rasmussen data support the obvious fact that attacking the Court isn't working outside of the left's already-committed base.

An interesting political question remains how a Supreme Court decision will impact the presidential election. Democrats, such as James Carville, suggest that if the Court overturns the law (or the mandate), it will be a tremendous benefit to Democrat electoral hopes. Color me skeptical.

Even Democrat pollster Pat Caddell says that Obamacare is likely be a political loser for Barack Obama, whether or not he wins reelection -- and deserves to be, because of how the law destroys consumer choice, raises prices, and centralizes health care decisions and power in Washington.

As Scott Rasmussen put it in a recent op-ed, "For something as fundamental as medical care, government policy must be consistent with deeply held American values. That's why an approach that increases consumer choice has solid support and a plan that relies on mandates and trusting the government cannot survive."

Obamacare and the role of the Supreme Court will be a fierce debate, and is likely to remain central to the presidential campaign regardless of the Court's verdict. It is too early to know just how the arguments will play out, or who will win them.

But what we do know is that the president's echo chamber will keep him mired, at least on these issues, in leftist talking points that those outside the bubble would recognize as ineffective campaign material, not least because of the lessons of the 1930s.

For the Democrats' narcissistic, historically ignorant group-think, perfectly exemplified by the president's attacks on the Supreme Court, Republicans should be grateful. It is one of the few reasons a moderately inspiring GOP nominee may be able to beat a dangerous and incompetent but "historic" incumbent president.


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