Contents - Constitutional Court of Georgia

70
Lucas Prakke
multaneously held congressional elections the Democrats also won. On 4 March 1933 Chief Justice
Hughes swore in the new president, and eight days later FDR turned to the American people with
the first of a long series of ‘Fireside Chats’ (radio broadcasts from the White House). 40
The promised New Deal took shape at a breathtaking pace. During the ‘100 days’, Roosevelt’s
first three months in office, he rushed fifteen very important bills through Congress. They constituted
a package of experimental legislative measures intended to set the American economy back
on its feet again and to alleviate the worst social need. Never before had Congress ventured into
this type of socio-economic legislation, which inevitably went hand-in-hand with a great deal of
bureaucracy. Opponents sneered at the ‘alphabet soup’ of the New Deal, because the laws were
all referred to by acronyms (NIRA: National Industrial Recovery Act, AAA: Agricultural Adjustment
Act, etc.). In a country where laws are subject to ‘judicial review’, it was inevitable that the anxious
question of how the Supreme Court would rule on the power of Congress to impose such drastic
restraints on economic freedom as it had in this case would present itself. The powers of the federal
legislature are specifically enumerated in the Constitution and it was highly dubitable whether the
New Deal legislation would withstand the Supreme Court’s review. The proof of the pudding was in
the eating, and the dish the Supreme Court served up to the nation as ‘constitutional laissez faire’
lay particularly heavy on the stomach. The Supreme Court swept away large parts of the New Deal.
Space does not permit a discussion of the relevant case-law here. 41 But to give an impression of the
scale of the damage caused, I shall briefly quote a number of American authors:
With a salvo of decisions during 1935–36, the Court tore great holes in the New Deal program
of recovery legislation. 42
Never before Franklin Roosevelt’s time had the Court taken almost the entire governmental
program of a contemporary President plus his (the pronoun is accurate) Congress and vetoed it
law by law … 43
In 1935 on a day New Dealers called ‘Black Monday’, the Court killed the NIRA, and ruled
against the Administration in two other important cases. In decisions that followed, the Court
continued to strike down Roosevelt’s major New Deal Legislation. 44
Jackson summarizes it all in the title of the fourth chapter of his book, ‘The Court Nullifies the
New Deal’, in which chapter the following passage, inter alia, can be found: ‘Meanwhile, “hell broke
loose” in the lower courts. Sixteen hundred injunctions restraining officers of the Federal Govern-
40 Chronicle of America, 1989, p. 692: ‘While unable to walk unassisted and usually confined to a wheelchair, he has stayed close to the
people by means of his Fireside Chats’. See also p. 658 and 659.
41 For this see Jackson, Struggle for Judicial Supremacy, which on p. 181 lists the most important rulings; the cited works of McCloskey
and Rodell also discuss the cases concerned, as do many hundreds of other books – not counting the casebooks on constitutional law,
of course.
42 McCloskey, op. cit., p. 111.
43 Rodell, op. cit., p. 214.
44 Equal Justice Under Law, p. 91.