Bogus history about the U.S. Supreme Court

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the blog for the Gem State Patriot News there is a post (or article) dated April 30, 2021 by Art daRosa titled Packing the Supreme Court. In it he makes an incorrect claim that:

 

“FDR increased the number of justices from six to nine. Doing so, he encroached into the Judicial Branch with the full intent of ignoring the Constitution and collapsing the principle of Separation of Power. The fact that the Democrats want to repeat what FDR did is the best proof that politicizing the Supreme Court will not work in the long run.”

 

But that is nonsense, and a careful editor would have asked daRosa where he got that. If you look at a web page for the U.S. Supreme Court you will instead find the following sentence:

 

“The number of Justices on the Supreme Court changed six times before settling at the present total of nine in 1869.”

 

As is shown above, an image from the Library of Congress has all nine justices in the 1886 Supreme Court. What FDR actually tried to do in 1937 was add up to another six justices, as is discussed by William E. Leuchtenburg in a May 2005 article in the Smithsonian Magazine titled When Franklin Roosevelt clashed with the Supreme Court – and lost.