Читать книгу American Democracy in Context - Joseph A. Pika - Страница 116

Roosevelt and his fellow New Deal Democrats greatly expanded the power of the national government. In stark contrast to the laissez-faire economic policies of their predecessors, which held that government should defer to the free market and intervene as little as possible in economic affairs, New Dealers believed government intervention in the economy was an essential step toward recovery.

A centerpiece of the New Deal was the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), or NIRA, which authorized the federal government to regulate industry in order to spur recovery. The NIRA also established a national public works program to create jobs. In the process, the government created vast regulatory structures in the form of the National Recovery Administration and the Public Works Administration. Congress claimed that it had the authority to do this by embracing a broad cooperative federalist interpretation of its commerce clause powers. The Supreme Court, however, was still controlled by dual federalists, and it struck down the NIRA as unconstitutional in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935).³⁷

The Supreme Court struck down other major pieces of New Deal legislation, including legislation that gave the federal government the authority to regulate wages, working hours, and production standards in the coal industry. Continuing to embrace dual federalism, the Court again concluded that Congress did not have authority under the commerce clause to regulate production.³⁸

President Roosevelt was furious about the string of defeats handed to him by the Supreme Court. After the Supreme Court invalidated the NIRA in Schechter, FDR held a press conference in which he criticized the decision by equating it with the Court’s infamous ruling in Dred Scott.³⁹ The press dubbed the four members of the Court who most consistently voted against the New Deal the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”⁴⁰ In the battle between the Four Horsemen and Roosevelt, the electorate seemed to come down squarely on the side of Roosevelt. While the Court continued to hand the New Deal more defeats, the president and his New Deal allies won landslide victories in the 1936 elections.

By 1936, the repudiation of the Republican Party was clear: Democrats won a 333–89 majority in the House and a 75–17 majority in the Senate, and FDR was reelected in a landslide (523 electoral votes to Republican Alf Landon’s 8).

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Emboldened, the newly reelected Roosevelt asked Congress to increase the size of the Supreme Court from nine to fifteen members. Several of the rulings against the New Deal had been by 5–4 or 6–3 votes, with dual federalists controlling the majority. Expanding the size of the Court would allow Roosevelt to appoint six new justices with a cooperative federalist perspective who would presumably uphold Congress’s power to enact New Deal legislation.