FDR

Two of the horses are pulling in unison today; the third is not.

Those who have intimated that the President of the United States is trying to drive that team, overlook the simple fact that the President, as Chief Executive, is himself one of the three horses.

It is the American people themselves who are in the driver's seat.

That, my friends, is what I honestly believe to have been the clear and underlying purpose of the patriots who wrote a federal constitution to create a national government with national power, intended as they said, "to form a more perfect…

Justice Washington laid down this limitation upon it: "It is but a decent respect due to the wisdom, the integrity and the patriotism of the legislative body, by which any law is passed, to presume in favor of its validity until its…

But since the rise of the modern movement for social and economic progress through legislation, the Court has more and more often and more and more boldly asserted a power to veto laws passed by the Congress and state legislatures in…

The Court has been acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body.

In the face of these dissenting opinions, there is no basis for the claim made by some members of the Court that something in the Constitution has compelled them regretfully to thwart the will of the people.

In the face of such dissenting opinions, it is perfectly clear that, as Chief Justice Hughes has said, "We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.

The Court in addition to the proper use of its judicial functions has improperly set itself up as a third house of the Congress--a super-legislature, as one of the justices has called it--reading into the Constitution words and…

We have, therefore, reached the point as a nation where we must take action to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself.

We must find a way to take an appeal from the Supreme Court to the Constitution itself.

We want a Supreme Court which will do justice under the Constitution--not over it.

In our courts we want a government of laws and not of men.

I want--as all Americans want--an independent judiciary as proposed by the framers of the Constitution.

That means a Supreme Court that will enforce the Constitution as written--that will refuse to amend the Constitution by the arbitrary exercise of judicial power-- amended by judicial say-so.

We must have men worthy and equipped to carry out impartial justice.

But, at the same time, we must have judges who will bring to the courts a present-day sense of the Constitution--judges who will retain in the courts the judicial functions of a court, and reject the legislative powers which the courts…

This plan will save our national Constitution from hardening of the judicial arteries.

Let me answer this question with a bluntness that will end all honest misunderstanding of my purposes.

I suggest only the addition of justices to the bench in accordance with a clearly defined principle relating to a clearly defined age limit.

Fundamentally, if in the future, America cannot trust the Congress it elects to refrain from abuse of our Constitutional usages, democracy will have failed far beyond the importance to it of any king of precedent concerning the judiciary.

We think it so much in the public interest to maintain a vigorous judiciary that we encourage the retirement of elderly judges by offering them a life pension at full salary.

It is the clear intention of our public policy to provide for a constant flow of new and younger blood into the judiciary.

But chance and the disinclination of individuals to leave the Supreme bench have now given us a Court in which five justices will be over seventy-five years of age before next June and one over seventy.