Thom Hartmann: Should President Biden Take a Lesson from FDR about SCOTUS? [View all]

The headline from last week’s Christian Science Monitor lays it out bluntly: “Majority of voters no longer trust Supreme Court.” An entire series of outrages from the radical Republicans on the Court have ginned up calls for President Biden and Congress — should he be re-elected and Democrats take both the House and Senate — to “pack” or expand the size of the Court.

Outrages include Republicans on the Court overturning Roe v Wade, gutting affirmative action, spitting on the Voting Rights Act, limiting civil rights, and a growing anticipation that the Court will soon go after the rights of queer people while further restricting access to abortion and birth control medications.

How did we get here, and what can we do about it? There’s a remarkable history here, from which we can learn important lessons and take inspiration, as I laid out in greater detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America. It should guide President Biden now.

With the 1929 onset of the Republican Great Depression and the 1932 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Supreme Court and the president were about to seriously clash for the first time in nearly a century. Four of the justices, Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter, were collectively known as the Four Horsemen. As FDR had success after success in passing major legislative initiatives to rescue America from twenty years of Republican maladministration, the Four Horsemen were invariably joined by one of the other justices to strike down New Deal legislation that attempted to address unemployment and poverty, no matter how popular it was.

https://hartmannreport.com/p/should-president-biden-take-a-lesson-4eb

I say yes. About 20 deep is my estimate.