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FDR and the Supreme Court
Hon Franklin D Roosevelt
Feb. 14, 1937
My dear Mr President:
As one who has enthusiastically approved all of your many great efforts in the past four years to solve the problems of the depression and to reform America's economic life in the interest so the great mass of the American people, I have been very greatly disappointed by your recent proposal to alter the composition of the Supreme Court.
I have been disappointed by the Court's repeatedly conservative decisions of recent years and do not accept its rigid concept of the Constitution. But I feel that the method you have chosen to correct this situation constitutes a direct blow at the independence of the judiciary, which I regard as one of the cardinal features of our form of government. If you succeed in this action for what I am willing to regard as a desirable purpose, what is to prevent some successor of yours using the same method to change the Court to his views? What then becomes of the Supreme Court as a coordinate branch of the Government? Would it not be merely a "football of politics"?
I accept in its entirely your declaration that our problems today demand Federal solutions and I think the ways and means of effecting this must be found either through interpretation of the Constitution as it now stands or by amendment. But I feel that the method you have chosen is not only undesirable, but unnecessary. If we have gotten through the last four years without a frontal attack on one of the fundamental features of our government can the present emergency be so great that the slower process of amendment could not have been used? And would an amendment have met the opposition that the present proposal has?
I am afraid there are many others who, like myself, agree with your political and economic philosophy and who have looked to you for a militant leadership in the attack on economic maladjustment and injustice, who feel faith in our institutions and in the people that it reveals. Couldn't all these worthy aims be achieved within the framework of our present constitutional structure?
I realize that technically your proposal is perfectly constitutional, since Congress has the power to alter the judiciary as it sees fit. But more fundamentally, doesn't your proposal constitute an attack on one of the chief features of our government, namely, the independent judiciary?
I hope you will see your way clear not to insist upon this part of your judicial reform program and that you will decide to use the more direct and straightforward, if slower, method of amendment.
Respectfully yours,
J-- E-- D--
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