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FDR and the Supreme Court
Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt
Dear Sir,
You have taken frequent steps to protect the unthinking many from having to bear the consequences of their own ignorant or thoughtless folly. Some of these were emergency steps, others were permanent. I shall not here quarrel with that philosophy of government though personally I am proud that, having made mistakes, I paid for them in full.
One of the follies of the thoughtless many is that they have sent you a Congress consisting largely of stooges, subservient to your will instead of being sufficiently wise and courageous to function as the legislative branch of the Federal Government. The pressure your powers of patronage and disbursement or allocation of Federal funds gives you seems to be sufficient to give you control of a Congress for which few of my contacts have the least respect.
You now purpose (sic) to use that power over a weak Congress to give you an equally weak Supreme Court. When that has been accomplished you can match Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler both as to rubber stamp legislatures and rubber stamp courts, and your power in the country will be equal to their power in theirs.
It may well be that you can afford to forfeit your interest in democratic government for the sake of being in the saddle when complete dictatorship arrives. It may well be that you consider complete dictatorship, under your own rule, as being in the interests of the foolish people who elected you and re-elected you to head the Executive branch of the Federal government. It is difficult to see how any reasonable person could otherwise interpret your methods of obtaining additional powers by circumvention of the Constitution rather than by permitting the States of the Union to consider grants of additional power in the orderly method provided for changing the Constitution when the States so desire.
You yourself once said that the instruments of power recently fashioned, however, would be dangerous in other hands. I remind you that they will ultimately pass into other hands. They may pass into very evil hands, because the people are foolish, they do not think, and because they are often betrayed by liars.
If you wish to be remembered for the good you did in office, you will use your present power to restore the Constitutional system of checks and balances so that a wicked man in the Presidency will not be able to wield unnatural amounts of power.
Very truly yours,
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