The Battle is On

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The Battle is On

Carter Glass
U. S. Senator, Virginia
By Radio from Washington, March 29, 1937

Publishing Information

Never in my career until now have I ventured to debate before the public a measure pending in the Senate and awaiting decision there; but the proponents of the problem to which I shall address myself tonight have seemed fearful of a deliberate consideration of the proposal to pack the Supreme Court of the United States; they have defiantly avowed their purpose to take the discussion into every forum, with the unconcealed intention of bringing pressure to bear on members of Congress to submit obediently to the frightful suggestion which has come to them from the White House.
The challenge has been accepted by those who oppose the repugnant scheme to disrupt representative government in the nation, and the battle is on to the end.
Confessedly, I am speaking tonight from the depths of a soul filled with bitterness against a proposition which appears to me utterly destitute of moral sensibility and without parallel since the foundation of the Republic.
However, I am not speaking my own mind alone; the character and intelligence of the nation are aroused and I am reflecting as best I can the indignant protests of thousands upon thousands of individual citizens whose telegrams and letters to me as a single Senator are on the desk before me as an inspiration against any faltering in this time of extreme peril to that charter of our liberties which Gladstone pronounced "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.
There has been some talk about "organized propaganda" against this unabashed proposition to pack the Supreme Court for a specified purpose! Propaganda was first organized in behalf of the scheme right here in Washington and has proceeded with unabated fury from the White House fireside to nearly every rostrum in the country. Political janizaries, paid by the Federal Treasury to perform services here and charged with no official responsibility for determining questions affecting the nation's judiciary, are parading the States in a desperate effort to influence the public against the Supreme Court of the United States.
One of these visionary incendiaries [Harold Ickes] spoke recently in a Southern State and exceeded all bounds of rational criticism in his vituperation of the eminent men who have served with great distinction on the Supreme bench. He is said to have been applauded by the audience of his partisans, which caused me to wonder if they could have known the type of person to whose unrestrained abuse of the Supreme Court and the great jurists who constitute its membership they approvingly listened.
Did they know that he recently reproached the South for providing separate public schools for the races; that he urged repeal of every statute and ordinance of segregation; that he practically committed the administration at Washington to a new Force Bill for the South, declaring that not since Lincoln's day has it better been realized than now the necessity of laws to strictly enforce the three post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution which kept the South in agony for years and retarded its progress for well nigh half a century?
This infuriated propagandist for degrading the Supreme Court practically proposes another tragic era of reconstruction for the South. Should men of his mind have part in picking the six proposed judicial sycophants, very likely they would be glad to see reversed those decisions of the court that saved the civilization of the South and, in spite of the menace of passionate partisans with their violent threats to "reorganize" the court, prohibited the seizure and confiscation, without pay, of the estates of private citizens.
It was the Supreme Court of the United States that validated the suffrage laws of the South which saved the section from anarchy and ruin in a period the unspeakable outrages of which nearly all the nation recalls with shame.
This, however, is merely an incidental aspect of the case, reflecting my intense personal resentment and sharply revealing the sectional animosity of some of the fierce defamers of the Supreme Court. Infinitely graver questions are presented.
This entire nation is aroused over the many definite proposals to reverse the deliberate judgments of an independent court and to substitute for them the previously pledged opinions of judicial subalterns. With men of this undisguised radical type campaigning the country freely applying their wretched opprobriums to the Supreme Court, those who resist the shocking movement are impertinently reproached with "organizing propaganda"!
I challenge any proponent of this packing contrivance to examine the thousands upon thousands of personal letters and telegrams sent to me and find in them anything but individual indignation at the proposal to make an executive puppet of our supreme judicial tribunal.
For myself, I think we should right now have "organized propaganda"—in the sense that the men and women of America who value the liberties they have enjoyed for 150 years should, with unexampled spontaneity, exercise their constitutional right of petition and, with all the earnestness of their souls, protest to Congress against this attempt to replace representative government with an autocracy.
Aside from these observations, let us consider the glaring proposal of the White House to pack the Supreme Court immediately with the President's own legal adherents for a specified purpose, and to enable him during his present term, even should there be not another, to entirely reconstitute the court with persons entertaining his extraordinary views of government.
The Attorney General, in inaugurating "organized propaganda" in behalf of the project, undertook to identify the names of Washington, Jefferson and other eminent Americans with expedients akin to the unprecedented proposal of the President.
Already I have publicly pronounced the assertion an indefensible libel on the fame of these great men, and was glad to note that the Attorney General omitted, in his statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee, to repeat the aspersion. The White House proposal is without precedent in the history of American jurisprudence. Its consequences portend evils beyond the anxiety of any person concerned for a decent administration of justice in this country. There is a precedent, dating back to the infamous Star Chamber processes of Great Britain, to which I shall presently refer.
George Washington, of course, was compelled to nominate a full Supreme Court at the very beginning of our national life, but no reputable person charged then or has ever believed since that Washington "packed" the court with men pledged to any certain line of conduct beyond faithful compliance with the required oath to uphold the Constitution in the sight of God, uninfluenced by the machinations of politicians or the self-interests of any group of men intent on draining the Federal Treasury. The men he selected for Chief Justice and associates were not only persons of eminence in the profession of the law but in character literally incapable of going on the bench to submit obediently to executive decrees.
I here and now challenge the proponents of this startling scheme to pack the Supreme Court for the avowed purpose of validating acts of Congress already decided to be unconstitutional, to produce one word written or spoken by Thomas Jefferson in advocacy of such a thing.
If there ever was a public man who, aside from an unimpeachable character, could have been suspected of a desire to do such a frightful thing, it was Thomas Jefferson. He hated John Marshall, Chief Justice of the court, who was his kinsman, and Marshall hated Jefferson. The latter bitterly condemned Marshall's opinions.
Recently emerged from under the tyranny of a mad King, Jeffersonians of the period dreaded the transformation of this Republic into a monarchy. They suspected Marshall of a desire, if not the purpose, to do this "step by step, insidiously," through judicial interpretations. They knew Alexander Hamilton, who was Marshall's powerful political associate, could well wish it to be done.
Jefferson was incensed at the obiter dicta in Marshall's famous opinion in the case of Marbury v. Madison and other notable causes. Perpetually afterward he bitterly censured this and other opinions of Marshall.
However, for six years after the delivery of Marshall's celebrated federalistic opinion, concurred in by the court, Thomas Jefferson was President of the United States, with full opportunity to propose reorganization of the Supreme Court to compel obedience to his views; but, with overwhelmingly supporting Congresses, he never then or at any time in all his life would have done such an abominable thing.
Aside from clear discernment of the vital importance of the checks and balances incorporated in the Constitution and his conception of judicial propriety, Jefferson would never have suggested such a thing, for the reason subsequently stated with characteristic clarity and force by Woodrow Wilson when he said:
"It is within the undoubted constitutional power of Congress to overwhelm the opposition of the Supreme Court on any question by increasing the number of justices and refusing to confirm any appointments to the new places which do not promise to change the opinion of the court. But we do not think such a violation of the spirit of the Constitution is possible, simply because we share and contribute to that public opinion which makes such outrages upon constitutional morality impossible by standing ready to curse them."
"Standing ready to curse them!" That vividly describes the attitude of thinking men arid women everywhere in America today toward this hateful attempt to drive eminent jurists from the bench in order to crowd into the court a lot of judicial marionettes to speak the ventriloquisms of the White House.
What Woodrow Wilson pungently described as an expedient to "overwhelm the Supreme Court" by "an outrage upon constitutional morality" is, in my view, the exact thing now proposed; and it requires little astuteness to predict with confidence that the prophecy of Wilson would come true and the curses of the American people, in the end, would be visited upon those responsible for this device to deprave the Supreme Court and to make a political plaything of the Constitution of the United States.
In like tenor with views entertained and frequently expressed by Woodrow Wilson were the profound convictions of another illustrious Democrat of the modern era. A practical student of government, a lover of his country, preeminent for courage and common sense, Grover Cleveland had a reverential regard for the Constitution and the courts. Nothing on the earth could have induced this stern patriot to lay impious hands upon either, or to say or do anything designed to inflame uninstructed public opinion against them.
Just prior to his second election to the Presidency, Cleveland made a notable address at a centennial celebration of the Supreme Court, reciting the sacrifices of the American people to be free and admonishing his hearers that the writers of the Constitution knew from bitter experience how readily instrumentalities of government were prone to trespass upon the liberties of the governed. Cleveland pointed out that, nevertheless, the founders of the Republic "calmly and deliberately established as a function of their government a check upon unauthorized freedom and a restraint upon dangerous liberty."
Said he:
"The attachment and allegiance of the founders to the sovereignty of their States were warm and unfaltering; but that did not prevent them from contributing a fraction of that sovereignty to the creation of a court which should guard and protect their new nation, and save and perpetuate a government which should, in all time to come, bless an independent people. Let us be glad in the possession of this rich heritage of American citizenship, and gratefully appreciate the wisdom and patriotism of those who gave to us the Supreme Court of the United States."
Telegram after telegram, letter after letter, sent me by the thousands, have said, "God bless the Supreme Court." But who wants God to bless a packed Supreme Court? Who wants to invoke divine blessing on a court not constituted to put "a check upon unauthorized freedom and restraint upon dangerous liberty," but reorganized to validate acts of Congress in contravention of the Constitution as now interpreted and to expound the Constitution in subservient obedience to the whims or obsessions or misguided judgment of a President of the United States?
Woodrow Wilson said such a court and those responsible for it would receive the curses of the American people. Grover Cleveland said the Supreme Court was created for no such sinister purpose. Our God still being in the heavens, it is my belief He would regard as unhallowed any invocation of His blessing on a court like that. We would better abolish the Supreme Court and, by the required process, do away outright with the Constitution if they are to be made the playthings of politicians.
What did Cleveland mean by checks and balances against "unauthorized freedom and dangerous liberty"? He was uttering a monition against legislative or executive invasion of the rights of the States, reserved to them under the Constitution, and to be "guarded and protected" by the Supreme Court. He meant what a Governor of a great State, afterward President of the United States, meant when seven years ago he made a vehement plea for respecting State rights and unsparingly denounced government by "commissions and regulatory bodies and special legislation."
The Governor warned that:
"To bring about government by oligarchy—masquerading as democracy—it is fundamentally essential that all authority and control be centralized in our national government. We are safe from the danger of any such departure from the principles on which this country was founded just so long as the individual home rule of the States is scrupulously preserved and fought for whenever they seem in danger."
This was Franklin D. Roosevelt in March, 1930. When, before, may I venture to ask, in the history of the country has this nation more nearly approached the situation thus deplored?
With Federal regulatory bodies in every community of the States and Federal bureaus in Washington bursting the bounds of marble palaces and overflowing into business houses and private homes, and with the State required supinely to submit their legislative statutes to the approval of bureaucratic boards here before they can get back a pittance of the prodigious sums picked from the pockets of their people in the form of taxes, State Rights, as well as the security and independence of private enterprise, are fast disappearing.
With private property seized at will; the courts openly reviled; rebellion rampant against good order and peace of communities; with governments pleading with mobocracy instead of mastering it, we seem to have reached that period of peril which Governor Roosevelt visioned seven years ago. This, with other dangerous evils, contrived or connived at, by governments, is the real crisis which faces the nation and cannot be cured by degrading the Supreme Court of the United States.
What does this court-packing scheme signify if it does not reflect the fury of its proponents against the Supreme Court of the United States for certain of its recent decisions asserting the rights of the States and individuals and private business under the law and prohibiting the proposed invasion of these by ill-digested Congressional legislation, largely devised by inexperienced and incompetent academicians? That is precisely what it is all about.
Had the judicial decisions sanctioned these rankly unconstitutional measures, who believes there would have been this unrestrained abuse of the court and this unprecedented attempt to flank the Constitution by putting on the bench six judicial wet-nurses to suckle the substance out of the opinions of jurists whose spirit of independence, thank God, keeps pace with their profound knowledge of the law?
That the purpose of the court project has accurately been stated by me is no longer in serious question. The President, in his message to Congress, implicitly conceded the proposition when he said if given legislative sanction for this irregular scheme, there would be no necessity of appealing to the people to so amend their Constitution as to authorize the things for which the Supreme Court had said there is now no authority, as well, perhaps, as unmentioned schemes of "unfettered" delegation of legislative power.
That can mean nothing else than that it was then the Executive determination to select six new judges who would validate acts of Congress already pronounced unconstitutional, and contemplated acts of a similar kind. Every speech made since, whether at the fireside or elsewhere, has confirmed this interpretation of the President's message to Congress. If that, in plain terms, isn't "packing the Supreme Court" for unsound purposes, I confess my inability to supply a better definition.
Moreover, the advocates of the scheme themselves reveal this purpose—some of them warily enough to have produced merriment in the committee room while others have bluntly and with evident lack of shame, said outright that this is the ghastly object of the proceeding. Still others specify some of the voided acts they propose to revive and render valid by the votes of the six new justices whom the country is assured will be selected for their "bias."
One of these acts, which lost American farmers their export markets and necessitated the importation of foreign foodstuffs to feed our own people, was nullified by two-thirds of the Supreme Court; but by adding to the minority the six "biased" votes to be packed onto the court, this decision may be overridden.
Another of the acts, voided by a unanimous vote of the Supreme Court and proposed to be revived for reversal, would severely test the persuasive powers and great legal attainments of the six "biased" justices, since it is difficult for six votes to subvert nine, no matter what the disparity of ages. All nine Supreme Court justices threw out the so-called NRA as an "unfettered" delegation of power, as it was an amazing thrust of Federal jurisdiction into every conceivable private business of the country.
Among its other vices it actually suspended for a period the laws of the nation against the depredations of monopoly and confided to Executive discretion, under a hateful species of coercion, involving fines and imprisonment, the fate of every business interest in the United States. Its administration was confided to a man, long a respected friend of mine, of unsurpassed accomplishments, with no selfish interest whatsoever to subserve; but in circumstances he was as ruthless and harsh as human nature ever gets.
The act and its administration created a reign of terror in the country; and everybody except the large industries which profited by the enforced failure of the smaller hailed the decision of the court with satisfaction.
We are told this is to be revived, along with the Guffey Coal Bill of somewhat a like nature, also declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court; and I am wondering if we are to witness the same sort of organized propaganda in their behalf as distinguished one oracle of the NRA, now prominently mentioned as one of the "biased" wet-nurses of the Supreme Bench.
In his first speech this man impudently denounced every American citizen as a "slacker" who should not volunteer obedience to the NRA. He urged the women of the country to pin white feathers on every person who would not willingly cooperate with enforcement; thus he would have put a badge of disgrace on all men and women who would not submit to the atrocious exactions of an act of Congress which all nine judges of the Supreme Court, young and old alike, pronounced unconstitutional.
The effrontery of this attempt to terrorize the people was in no degree abated by the fact that this valiant propagandist, now conspicuously pictured as one of the probable selections for the Supreme Court bench, sat in a swivel chair during the whole period of the World War, never hearing a percussion cap pop, or sensing the smell of gunpowder, or getting near enough to a training camp to learn the difference between "order arms" and "forward march." With Jacobins of this type constituting the wet-nurse section of the Supreme Court, what an era of peace and contentment could the American people confidently anticipate with the revival of the NRA and kindred vagaries of the brain-truster variety!
What other and how many peculiar schemes of government are to be presented for submissive legislative action in confident expectation that they will meet with the favor of the "biased" half dozen who are to adorn the bench, is left to our imagination, because not exactly specified in the proclaimed program. We are simply given to understand that the President has a "mandate from the people" to so reconstitute the Supreme Court as to have it sanction whatever the White House proposes to an agreeing Congress, particularly if it involves no "check upon unauthorized freedom,"' to quote Grover Cleveland again, or "restraint on dangerous liberty."
But we know there has been no such mandate from the people to rape the Supreme Court or to tamper with the Constitution. The Constitution belongs to the people. It was written by great representatives of the people, chosen for the purpose, and was ratified by the people as the supreme charter of their government, to be respected and maintained with the help of God.
With the consent and by mandate of the people, their Constitution provides how it may be amended to meet the requirements of the ages. It has always been so, and no ad-ministration in the history of the Republic has attempted to flank the Constitution by a legislative short-cut so vividly denounced by Wood row Wilson as "an outrage upon constitutional morality."
The people were not asked for any such mandate. They were kept in ignorance of any such purpose. They were told that the liberal aims of the President could very likely be achieved within the limitations of the Constitution; and if not, we would suggest to the people amendments that would authorize such certain things to be done. When once it was intimated by political adversaries that the Supreme Court might be tampered with, the insinuation was branded as a splenetic libel.
No word in the platform of the prevailing party could be interpreted into advocacy of any such abnormity as that now in issue. Quite the contrary, every platform declaration on the subject gave promise of the customary constitutional procedure. But somebody badly advising the President was evidently afraid of the people. The Attorney General apparently feared to "ask a mandate from the people" for his wretched scheme, defended so weakly in reason as to invite expressions of contempt.
Convicted by his own official reports of inaccurate assertions about congestion of the Supreme Court calendar, and now flatly contradicted on this and other points by the Chief Justice and associates, there is nothing left of his bitter assault on the court more notable than the brutal contention that six eminent members "get out" and give place to six others of a compliant type, in the selection of whom the Department of Justice would probably have a cunning hand.
Of course the proposal being discussed will not contribute to the efficiency of the court. It will do in this case particularly what Thomas Jefferson pungently deplored when he declared "the multiplication of judges only enables the weak to outvote the wise." The fact is their proposed bill will cure none of the alleged evils which offend their ideas of judicial reform.
Why should we not proceed, as in honor we are bound to do, by first contriving legislation for social and economic security, painstakingly drafted by competent lawyers with a clear conception of the constitutional prohibitions against invading the rights of business and individuals by a species of confiscation and by utter indifference for reserved powers of the States?
Why should we not quit legislating by pious preambles and conform our enactments to the requirements of the Constitution and thus put upon notice the cabal of amateur experimenters that we will have no more of their trash.
Let us have no more bills for "unfettered" delegation of authority, so obviously unconstitutional as to have prompted the President to make an unhappy appeal for disregarding all "reasonable doubts." Let us meet the issue confidently, but with a determination to promote the general welfare of the nation and not merely to surrender control of the government to special groups.
If it then be found that we were mistaken in the ex-pressed belief that the Constitution is ample to our purposes, let us do what we promised to do and appeal to the people to amend their supreme law. Let the impatient proponents of the pending scheme turn to the advice of George Wash-ington in his famous Farewell Address in which he admonished against disregarding "reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power," saying: "If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way in which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation, for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."
Let those who would confide to the President complete control over the Supreme Court by sanction of an obedient Congress reread the farewell address of Andrew Jackson in which he cautioned the country against the jeopardy to their liberties of a consolidated government and the evil consequences of "permitting temporary circumstances, or the hope of better promoting the public welfare, to influence, in any degree, our decisions upon the extent of the authority of the general government." "Let us abide by the Constitution as it is written," he urged, "or amend it in the constitutional mode if it be found defective."
And, in this connection, it might be well for the proponents of this court-packing scheme, who started their campaign by taking the name of Thomas Jefferson in vain, to remember that Jefferson's bitterness against the Supreme Court was provoked by the very thing they now advocate.
Jefferson condemned the court for its failure to void the unbridled actions of Congress in invading the rights of the States, whereas the court-packers are incensed against the court for restraining the unconstitutional actions of Congress in disregarding individual and community rights. Their position is in sharp antagonism to that of Jefferson, who never dreamed of packing the Supreme Court to compel obedience to his views. Evidently Jefferson thought, as Woodrow Wilson afterward proclaimed, that such a thing involved "constitutional immorality."
I venture to beg the public not to be diverted from the real issue involved in this controversy. Contesting the court constitutional authority to void acts of Congress is idle surplusage. The court has exercised this implied power for 130 years. It has been regarded as an indispensable power in government under a written Constitution. There must be a Supreme tribunal to which every citizen, high or humble, rich or poor, may appeal for the vindication of his rights and the preservation of life, liberty and prosperity.
Long before the Supreme Court was established this principle was presented by Chancellor Wythe, Jefferson's law partner, with respect to acts of Parliament and decrees of the Crown. It is a waste of time to discuss now this and other moot questions not touched in the remotest sense by the pending proposition.
Under the bill sent up to Congress, prepared by God knows whom, the six substitute justices would exercise the established power to rule finally on the acts of Congress; and the dangerous circumstance faces the nation that we know pretty well in advance what their rulings would be. The questions of majority or other numerical decisions is not comprehended in the White House proposal, nor the right of Congress to review and reverse the court's decisions.
The predominant question is whether the practice of a century under an independent judiciary is to be abruptly terminated by authorizing the President to seize the court by the process of packing, in order to compel agreement with the Executive views.
Should this be done without "a mandate from the people?"
Should the people be ignored and, without asking their consent in the usual way, submit helplessly to having their Constitution tortured into meanings which have been declared in contravention of the fundamental law?
If Andrew Jackson was right in asserting that "Eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty," God knows that never before since the establishment of the Republic could the people better be warned to preserve their priceless heritage. The talk about "party loyalty" being involved in the opposition to this extraordinary scheme is a familiar species of coercion. It is sheer poppy-cock. No political party since the establishment of the government ever dared make an issue of packing the Supreme Court.
But a single one of the Presidents of the United States was ever accused of doing such a thing, and the mere suspicion, however ill-founded in truth, has proved a taint upon his reputation which his memorable military achieve-ments have not been able entirely to wipe away. Moreover his alleged offense was inconsequential in contrast with that which now threatens the nation.
As Warren says in his history of the Supreme Court:
"To the proposal advanced at various times of intense party passion, that the court be increased in number to overcome a temporary majority for or against some particular piece of legislation, the good sense of the American people has always given a decided disapproval."
And as James Bryce, in his "American Commonwealth," says, whenever such a thing should occur "the security provided for the protection of the Constitution is gone like a morning mist." Thomas Jefferson in a single sentence comprised the unalterable detestation of honest men for the packing of the court when he said:
"It is better to toss up cross and pile in a cause than to refer to a judge whose mind is warped by any motive whatever in that particular case.
Later he wrote:
"An officer who selects judges for principles which necessarily lead to condemnation, might as well take his culprits to the scaffold without the mockery of trial."
This Jefferson said of packed jurors. How infinitely worse would be a packed Supreme Court, albeit in one case the penalty is imprisonment and in the other the universal abhorrence of mankind!
I have said this proposal to pack the Supreme Court is without precedent in American jurisprudence and that we must go back for a corresponding scheme to the infamous processes of the British Star Chamber. Macaulay gives us the incident. When the King wanted a servile court to sanction his purposes, contrary to decisions rendered, he summoned the Chief Justice to the palace and told him peremptorily that he would be dismissed unless he changed his options.
"Sire," said the courageous Chief Justice, "my position is of little concern to me, since I have not many years to live; but my convictions are of vital importance, and I am humiliated to find that Your Majesty could think me capable of altering my mind merely to retain my place!"
The Chief Justice then bravely admonished his kingly master:
"Your Majesty may find twelve judges of your mind, but hardly twelve honest lawyers."
Needless to say, the Chief Justice was dismissed, just as the offending members of the Supreme Court have been rudely told to "begone" if they do not relish the proposed mortification of being supplied with six judicial wet-nurses; and well might any one or all of these eminent jurists, in imitation of that fearless Englishman, say to the appointing power:
"You may find six judges of your mind, but not six Constitutional lawyers."
Should the iniquitous scheme go through, the intelligence and character of the nation will be interested to know what lawyer of notable attainments or independent spirit would be willing to go on the Supreme Court bench in such circumstances or could regard such an appointment as an honor.
Doubtless there are practitioners eager for such recog-nition; but are they men whom the nation would prefer or who could feel comfortable in association with those now constituting the court?
I am but an unlearned layman, untrained in the ethics of the legal profession; nevertheless, I cannot escape the conclusion that any man of approved sensibility who should accept such a distinction would experience trouble in outliving the mistake. Moreover, I have a distinct premonition that the people of America would not confidently trust to the supreme decision of such a court the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness guaranteed by the Constitution.
I am far from intimating that the President of the United States is incapable of selecting suitable men for the Supreme Court. I am simply accepting his own word and that of his spokesmen to the effect that he wants men "biased" in behalf of his legislative and administrative projects, who may be counted on to reverse the Supreme Court decisions already rendered and give such other decisions of policy as may be desired.
This is not my view alone; it is the conclusion of mil-lions of alarmed citizens throughout the nation.
The assumption of the proponents of this scheme to tamper with the court and the Constitution that only they are the President's real friends, has no justification in fact. He is not a friend of the President who would subject him to the biting indictment which Rudyard Kipling applied to a famous autocrat who answered a petition from his people with the imperious assertion that—"This is my country. These are my laws. Those who do not like to obey my laws can leave my country."
Wrote Kipling:
"He shall break his judges if they cross his word;
"He shall rule above the law, calling on the Lord.
"Strangers of his counsel, hirelings of his pay,
"These shall deal out Justice: sell—deny—delay.
"We shall take our station, dirt beneath his feet,
"While his hired captains jeer us in the street."
Rather is he the real friend of the President who will commend to his serious attention the ringing words of Thomas Jefferson when he proclaimed himself "against writing letters to judiciary officers," because he "thought them independent of the Executive, not subject to its coercion and therefore not obliged to attend to its admonitions.
In conclusion, my friends, let me press upon you the solemn warning of a world-renowned student of representative government, John Stuart Mill, when he said:
"A people may prefer a free government; but if from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it; if they will not fight for it when directly attacked; if they can be deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out of it; if by momentary discouragement, or temporary panic or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions—in all these cases they are more or less unfit for liberty."
Abraham Lincoln, at Gettysburg, thought the Civil War was a test of whether a "government of the people, by the people, for the people" should perish from the face of the earth.
Just as profoundly are some of us convinced that no threat to representative democracy since the foundation of the Republic has exceeded in its evil portents this attempt to pack the Supreme Court of the United States and thus destroy the purity and independence of this tribunal of last resort.