How did the Supreme Court respond to the New Deal? How did FDR respond to the Court? How did Americans respond to this battle between the Court and the president?
While many Americans welcomed the New Deal, FDR's policies were controversial. Some Americans were opposed to this rapid expansion in the role of the federal government, and FDR's harshest critics accused him of being a dictator or a socialist.
The U.S. Supreme Court declared the two most important policies of the first New Deal unconstitutional in 1935 and 1936. In 1935, in the case of Schechter Poultry v. U.S., the Court ruled that the NIRA unconstitutional because it exceeded the federal government's authority to regulate interstate commerce. (The Schechter brothers, who sued the government, operated a chicken business in New York City.) In 1936, in the case of Butler v. U.S., the Court declared the AAA unconstitutional because the federal government did not have the authority to impose production curbs and to pay farmers not to grow crops.
Roosevelt was furious at the Supreme Court for declaring the NIRA and AAA unconstitutional. The Constitution does not say how many justices the Supreme Court should contain, so Roosevelt proposed a new law, which would allow the president to appoint as many as six new justices, increasing the Court's membership from nine to fifteen. Critics quickly denounced this proposal, calling it the Court-packing scheme. FDR's proposal backfired, to the extent that many Americans agreed that the president's willingness to change the membership of the Court seemed to exceed the constitutional powers of the presidency. On the other hand, FDR's plan also succeeded, to the extent that it led the Court to look more favorably on New Deal programs in its rulings in 1937 when the Court ruled that the Wagner Act was constitutional.