thrown all the affairs of this great nation back
into hopeless chaos. In effect, four justices
ruled that the right under a private contract to
exact a pound of flesh was more sacred than
the main objectives of the Constitution to
establish an enduring nation.
Obviously, this should not be risked again. Roosevelt
continued:
Last Thursday I described the American form
of government as a three-horse team
provided by the Constitution to the American
people so that their field might be plowed.
The three horses are, of course, the three
branches of government—the Congress, the
executive, and the courts. Two of the horses,
the Congress and the executive, are pulling in
unison today; the third is not.
Roosevelt then pointed out that the U.S. Constitution had
not actually endowed the Supreme Court with the right to
challenge the constitutionality of legislation, but that it had
assumed this role in 1803. At the time, Justice Bushrod
Washington had stipulated that the Supreme Court should
“presume in favor of [a law’s] validity until its violation of the
Constitution is proved beyond all reasonable doubt.”
Roosevelt then charged:
In the last four years the sound rule of giving
statutes the benefit of all reasonable doubt
has been cast aside. The Court has been
acting not as a judicial body, but as a
policymaking body.
Roosevelt claimed that he had an electoral mandate to
change this situation and that “after consideration of what
reform to propose the only method which was clearly
constitutional … was to infuse new blood into all our courts.”
He also argued that the Supreme Court judges were
overworked, and the load was just too much for the older
justices—who happened to be the ones striking down his
legislation. He then proposed that all judges should face