The Court-packing Plan

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Court-packing plan”—officially titled the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937—was an attempt to alter the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court after it held key provisions of his “New Deal” legislation to be unconstitutional. The main provision of the plan was to allow Roosevelt to appoint a new justice to the Court, up to a total of six, for every sitting justice who declined to retire upon reaching the age of seventy and who had ten years of service. Although some historians argue that “the switch in time that saved nine”—referring to a change of opinion by Associate Justice Owen Roberts to favor a piece of New Deal legislation in the case of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, which was seen as a strategic move to protect the Court—resulted in a Roosevelt victory, the Court-packing legislation was never passed, and Roosevelt’s proposal cost him popularity both with the general public and within his own party.