Joseph R. Biden Jr. Quotes

It is argued whether Scalia’s problem was that the Supreme Court was doing something new or radical or the country had changed. He had certainly lived through the greatest transformation of any society and culture on earth at a pace of change that far exceeds anything that has occurred before. Scalia is one who believes that the Constitution should not be interpreted in recognition of these changes, but should be immutable as it was written for the late 18th century. Most judges and legal scholars disagree and try to interpret the Constitution as the founders would have intended, knowing what we know, having the tools and powers we have, and facing the problems of the modern world. It represents a major legal and philosophical debate.

Byrnes later was appointed to the court.

Cummings was arguing against a Constitutional amendment. His alternative led to Roosevelt's court packing schema.

In reference to the Supreme Court "packing" legislation proposed by President Roosevelt, Prof. Cushman wrote:

Referring to issues regarding slavery:

Jefferson’s fears were later reinforced by John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison {606468}

The Roosevelt administration had stemmed the tide of Hoover’s Great Depression but the nation had not yet recovered. The New Deal measures, most of which would be considered fundamental to good government 50 years later was being constantly thwarted by a Supreme Court with a strong arch conservative majority headed by James McReynolds, a virulent, overt, anti-Semitic racist, who hated FDR—see {616652} and {585241}. The situation was to many like that which existed before the Civil War when the Court rendered the Dred Scott decision that so harmed the nation. Frankfurter, not then a Supreme Court Justice, urged Roosevelt to do something lest the American Public lose all respect for the Court and our Constitutional system and have the nation harmed by not allowing reforms like child labor laws to go through. The court actually ruled by a narrow majority that the government could not pass laws making it illegal for 11 year old children to work in coal mines or factories. FDR attempted to add more justices turning the majority into a majority—“packing the Supreme Court”, but that politically backfired. Some of the reforms never went through while others needed Constitutional Amendments like the end to Prohibition.

Originally it was published in Boston under the name “A Columbian Patriot.” She was worried about the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court extending throughout the country and yet the nation was very much smaller then than it is today. However, transport and communications have grown with the country.

This is a classic example of taking a principle and extrapolating it to an absurd degree. The Supreme Court did rule that there was a right to privacy and did rule that the state could not interfere with most consensual sex in the home including adultery. However the court did not permit bigamy or polygamy, sex with minors, and a host of other areas where the common weal is benefitted. Santorum and others with his view believe that the state should have the right to criminalize adultery and homosexual contact in a private home. And they indeed had this prerogative at earlier times. People were jailed for adultery in Virginia, for having intercourse in different positions in Alabama, for using condoms in Connecticut and others. However, most of the support for these sexual control laws came from religious fundamentalists who wanted the state to enforce their religious beliefs on all. That together with the privacy right, no longer allowed these state abuses if individual freedom. Ironically, most of the advocates for the state’s having the right to restrict sexual freedom. Think of themselves as advocates of individuality and the government not telling folks what to do or how to behave.

While this was a strong central political principle for Reagan, a substantial part of his political party strongly advocated the against the government interjecting itself into people’s lives.

The Chief Justice at the time was an ultra-conservative judge, who together with his 8 colleagues—all conservative—had blocked much of the democratic and progressive legislation that the Congress had passed. FDR had a much different legal and philosophical view of the Constitution than the Chief Justice, and the court would declare much of his New Deal legislation, passed in the emergency of the Great Depression, unconstitutional. Almost all of those “unconstitutional” things were years later passed again and this time a more modern court found they were Constitutional.