Pitching A Plan Big Time - James Roosevelt Selling The Supreme Court - 1937
(James Roosevelt - selling dad's plan in 1937)
When FDR suggested changes be made in the Supreme Court, appointing as many as six additional justices instead of the usual nine, it was a hard sell. In fact it went down to a stinging 70-20 Senate defeat by July. But FDR did a huge sales pitch for the plan, including enlisting his son James to stump for its passage.
James Roosevelt: “ I believe you will come to the conclusion that the President’s proposal if the most effective way to make constitutional democracy work. It confers no new powers. It takes away no previously existing authority. It is unquestionably constitutional. It will enable the Chief Executive to carry out with quickness and dispatch all those measures which meet the cry for repair and restoration. To you and to me and to millions of others throughout our country, it will bring comfort in the thought that those evil years of eight, yes of even twenty years ago will not come back.”
I'm sure at the time most Republicans had coronaries over the thought of six additional judges, all appointed by FDR setting the laws of the land. No doubt the wave of fear and calls of Dictatorship ran up and down the ranks of the right wing like a flu epidemic. But I can only imagine what it would have been like, had those fifteen judges been in place around the time of Bush, or even Nixon for that matter.
The mind fairly reels.
Perhaps some things were best not to have happened after all.
There is impeachemnet; which is exactly where the five fascists of the apocolypse should be taken.
In fact, Roberts and Alito have no business on the bench, considering they were appointed by a guy who was appointed by the Court.
Rush Limbaugh is what a smart person thinks a stupid bigot sounds like.
When's that photo of Jimmy Roosevelt from? Almost looks like it was taken yesterday.
1940. Time Magazine.
Because the threat of packing the Supremes with FDR's men scared the Supremes into rubber stamping most of FDR's proposed legislation, whereas before they fought it tooth-and-nail on Constitutional grounds. After that, the SC could never honestly claim political neutrality.
As to what a politically polarized SC is capable of, think of the 2000 Elections and the Citizens United ruling. It isn't always a a good thing.
...invited Abram to his office to discuss his organizing system**.
Throughout the 1920s, Abram directed Seattle's division of Goodwill Industries. He didn't just open stores for used clothes; he organized 49,000 housewives into thirty-seven districts and set them to work salvaging goods for the poor. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt, governor of New York, invited Abram to his office to discuss his organizing system. Later he'd come to see Russian red running through out Roosevelt's New Deal, but at the time Abram was captivated by another man summoned to advise the governor, James Augustine Farrell, president of the United States Steel Corporation. Abram had met industry chiefs before then, but here was a titan. A tall, stern man of dark suits and high collars, Farrell had led U.S. Steel for decades, since not long after its creation as the biggest business enterprise in history, and he had a reputation as an industrial free thinker.
The year before he'd rebuked a group of businessmen for treating workers like animals. Farrell looked on his employees more like children. Big business, he believed, ought to act as a big brother, and to that end he insisted that the age of competition had passed; captains of industry must be freed of antitrust legislation so that they might better council together for the good of the innocent and the poor.
Abram fixed his rapt attention on the "steel shogun," as the press of the time called the industrialist. "Mr. Farrell reviewed the history of America," he'd remember, "and pointed out that we have had nineteen depressions—five major ones—and that every one was caused by disobedience to divine laws." Farrell offered no evidence for his dismissal of economic factors, but he did have a solution on hand. "Now," Abram recorded his words, "I am a Roman Catholic and we don't go in much for revivals and such things, but I am sure as I am sitting here that if we don't get a thorough revival of genuine religion ... with a return to prayer and the Bible"—an oddly Protestant aim—"we are headed for chaos." Farrell suggested that the time had come for the "leaders of industry" to take the reins not just of the economy but of the entire nation in order to restore it to a godly path. –JEFF SHARLET
**Abraham Vereide, in 1953, started the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, which would become known as the National Prayer Breakfast.
Study the symptoms not the virus...
... The wall of separation fell?
In 1936, Vereide established Christian Businessmen's Committee which provided a daily luncheon gathering for leaders of the city's retail, trade and banking communities. His views on urban renewal were sought and implemented in San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and New York. His recurring theme was that the head, heart and hand of necessity had to be actively engaged and energized spiritually to bring moral and economic recovery and transformation to the prevalent decay in the nation's metropolitan areas. Abraham addressed the United States Congress in 1936 and following launched a Governor's Prayer Breakfast in Richmond, Virginia.[8][9]
In 1942, Vereide founded Fellowship Foundation Inc. in Chicago as the middle United States headquarters for the growing prayer cell and prayer breakfast planting ministry. He then returned to Washington, D.C. to develop prayer cells among national leaders. Senator Frank Carlson and Judge Boyd Leedom joined him in this pursuit. Conrad Hilton provided additional conference meeting spaces. President Franklin D. Roosevelt conferred with Vereide. President Eisenhower became a proponent of this effort and Edward L.R. Elson, chaplain to the president and later chaplain to the U.S. Senate, encouraged the expansion of this ministry in government life. :-/
See "In God We Trust" mandated in the 50's and "I pledge allegiance"...under God, as well.
Study the symptoms not the virus...
that allows the citizens to remove any federal or supreme court judge by national referrendum on a simple majority vote. say, whenever the citizens of 10 states succeed in getting a removal initiative on their state's ballot, the remoaning states shall be obliged to put the measure on their ballots as well. A referendum could be voted in any national election, with no limit on the number of attempts, and removal for any cause that the People deem worthy of removal. states would be prohibited from creating special hurdles, beyond normal ballot initiatives that are intended to prevent the success of such measures. Any judge or justice so removed would be thereafter prohibited from serving in any public office or in any position of trust and authority in government or business. any judge or justice so removed will be specifically denied exemption frompunishment under the law for crimes and torts they committed while sitting at the bench.
Such an amendment would side step Congress, once they approve of the amendment and send it out to the states for ratification. It would also remind the extreme court justices and federal judges that they are accountable to the People; if they wish to declare, through their decisions, open warfare on the Constitution and the rights of the people, then let them be disgraced and removed from their offices in disgrace. Let them also be barred from ever holding any position of public or private trust or authority, for the remainder of their natural lives.
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