FDR’s court-packing scheme was a 1937 proposal, formally titled the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill, that would have let President Franklin Roosevelt appoint up to six additional Supreme Court justices to dilute a conservative majority that kept striking down his New Deal. It failed in the Senate after members of Roosevelt’s own party revolted, and it became unnecessary when the Court began upholding New Deal laws on its own and a conservative justice retired, giving Roosevelt his first vacancy.
What the Bill Would Have Done
Roosevelt sent the bill to Congress on February 5, 1937. Its central provision let the president appoint one additional judge to any federal court for every sitting judge who was over seventy, had served at least ten years, and had not retired within six months of becoming eligible. For the Supreme Court, the total was capped at fifteen justices.1The American Presidency Project. Message to Congress on the Reorganization of the Judicial Branch of the Government
The math was the point. Six of the nine sitting justices were over seventy. Roosevelt could have immediately named six new members, giving him a working majority without waiting for anyone to die or retire.
His public argument was efficiency. In a fireside chat on March 9, 1937, he framed the plan as a way to bring “a steady and continuing stream of new and younger blood” into a backlogged federal judiciary. In the same speech he was more candid about the goal, calling for “a series of Federal Courts willing to enforce the Constitution as written, and unwilling to assert legislative powers by writing into it their own political and economic policies.”2The American Presidency Project. Fireside Chat Almost nobody treated the efficiency rationale as the real one.
Why Roosevelt Wanted It
Roosevelt had just won reelection with roughly 61 percent of the popular vote and 46 of 48 states. Democrats held huge majorities in both chambers. And yet the Supreme Court kept striking down the legislation that majority had produced.
A conservative bloc known as the Four Horsemen — Pierce Butler, James McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter — voted consistently against New Deal statutes, and they picked up a fifth vote often enough to prevail.3U.S. Capitol – Visitor Center. U.S. Supreme Court, Photograph, 1937 In May 1935, the Court unanimously struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States.4Justia. A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935) In 1936, it invalidated the Agricultural Adjustment Act in United States v. Butler.5Oyez. United States v. Butler With his signature programs falling one after another, Roosevelt concluded that reshaping the Court was the only way to protect them.
Congress Had the Power to Do It
The Constitution does not fix the number of Supreme Court justices. Article III creates “one supreme Court” and leaves the structure to Congress.6Congress.gov. Constitution of the United States – Article III The size of the Court had already changed six times before settling at nine in 1869.7Supreme Court of the United States. The Court as an Institution After the Civil War, Congress shrank the Court to seven seats to keep President Andrew Johnson from filling vacancies, then restored it once Ulysses Grant took office.8Federal Judicial Center. Landmark Legislation: Circuit Reorganization The mechanism was legal. The scale, and the naked purpose, was what set off the fight.
Why It Failed
Opposition was immediate and it came from inside Roosevelt’s coalition. Vice President John Nance Garner opposed the plan openly. Democrats who had voted for every previous New Deal measure declined to follow the president on this one. The objection was less about policy than about judicial independence and the separation of powers.
On June 14, 1937, the Senate Judiciary Committee filed an adverse report recommending the bill not pass. The language was unusually harsh. The committee called the measure “an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country” and said it was “essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy that the judiciary be completely independent of both the executive and legislative branches.” It urged that the bill “be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.”9Pepperdine School of Public Policy. New Deal Legislation – Section: Senate Judiciary Committee Adverse Report
While Congress argued, the Court moved. On March 29, 1937, less than two months after Roosevelt introduced the bill, the justices upheld a Washington State minimum wage law in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish by a 5–4 vote.10Justia. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937) The prior year, the Court had struck down a nearly identical New York law. The difference was Justice Owen Roberts, who crossed over. Contemporaries dubbed the shift “the switch in time that saved nine,” and although Court papers later suggested Roberts had actually voted to uphold the Washington law at an internal conference in December 1936, before the plan was announced,11Yale Law Journal. West Coast Hotels Place in American Constitutional History the political effect was the same. On April 12, 1937, the Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., again 5–4, endorsing a broad reading of the Commerce Clause the Court had rejected for years.12Oyez. National Labor Relations Board v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation
The last piece fell into place on May 18, 1937, when Justice Van Devanter, one of the Four Horsemen, sent Roosevelt his retirement letter. Roosevelt now had a vacancy to fill and a Court that was upholding his programs.13Duke Law Scholarship Repository. FDRs Court-Packing Plan: A Second Life, a Second Death Whatever urgency the bill had was gone. The Senate recommitted it to the Judiciary Committee, and it died there.
What It Cost, and What Changed Anyway
The fight damaged Roosevelt. His reputation for political invincibility broke. Conservative Democrats who had gone along with earlier New Deal measures now viewed him with suspicion, and in the 1938 midterms Democrats lost six Senate seats, 71 House seats, and a dozen governorships. The losses fell hardest on pro-New Deal Democrats, leaving Roosevelt with a more conservative Congress for the rest of his second term.
The substantive victory, though, was his. The Court never returned to its pre-1937 stance on federal economic regulation. Roosevelt went on to appoint eight justices through ordinary vacancies, reshaping the bench more completely than the bill would have. The expansion of federal power over commerce and labor that Jones & Laughlin confirmed became settled law.
The political shadow was longer. The nine-justice Court, always a creature of statute rather than the Constitution, hardened into something closer to a norm. For decades afterward, “court-packing” functioned as an accusation, and any president or party that appeared to threaten judicial independence had to answer for the comparison.