monarchy, congressmen and senators understood that if the president could undermine the independence of the judiciary, then this would undermine the balance of power in the system that protected them from the president and ensured the continuity of pluralistic political institutions.
Perhaps Roosevelt would have decided next that obtaining legislative majorities took too much compromise and time and that he would instead rule by decree, totally undermining pluralism and the U. S. political system. Congress certainly would not have approved this, but then Roosevelt could have appealed to the nation, asserting that Congress was impeding the necessary measures to fight the Depression. He could have used the police to close Congress. Sound farfetched? This is exactly what happened in Peru and Venezuela in the 1990s. Presidents Fujimori and Chávez appealed to their popular mandate to close uncooperative congresses and subsequently rewrote their constitutions to massively strengthen the powers of the president. The fear of this slippery slope by those sharing power under pluralistic political institutions is exactly what stopped Walpole from fixing British courts in the 1720s, and it is what stopped the U. S. Congress from backing Roosevelt’ s court-packing plan. Roosevelt had encountered the power of virtuous circles. But this logic does not always play out, particularly in societies that may have some inclusive features but that are broadly extractive. We have already seen these dynamics in Rome and Venice. Another illustration comes from comparing Roosevelt’ s failed attempt to pack the Court with similar efforts in Argentina, where crucially the same struggles took place in the context of predominantly extractive economic and political institutions.
The 1853 constitution of Argentina created a Supreme Court with duties similar to those of the U. S. Supreme Court. An 1887 decision allowed the Argentine court to assume the same role as that of the U. S. Supreme Court in deciding whether specific laws were constitutional. In theory, the Supreme Court could have developed as one of the important elements of inclusive political institutions in Argentina, but the rest of the political and economic system remained highly extractive, and there was neither empowerment of broad segments of society nor pluralism