Volu m e I - Purdue University Calumet

These acts undoubtedly exceed both Congress’ and the President’s enumerated powers and were in
violation of the Constitution. Many factors went into the Courts approval of these acts including threats
from Roosevelt to pack the Court in order to get his policies upheld. Additionally by his fourth term
Roosevelt had appointed all nine of the Supreme Court justices, establishing a bias toward Roosevelt’s
agenda.
It is during this time that a change is made in the jurisprudence of the Court. There is a shift from a
Court whose goal is to maintain the system of duel federalism that is rooted in the Constitution to a Court
that is willing to enlarge federal government eliminating key elements of the federalist system. The Court
“choose to abandon the preexisting constitutional conceptions of limited government, which was rooted
primarily in the concept of federalism and property right” (Keck 17). This active role that the Court had
throughout the depression “has been found by many judges and scholars to be illegitimate in a democratic
system” (Keck 17). To demonstrate this shift I will examine four cases, two of which show the expansion of
Congress’ power: National Labor Relations Board v Jones & Laughlin Steel (1937) and Wickard v Filburn
(1942), along with two of which exemplify the expansion of the President’s power: Korematsu v U.S.
(1944) and Ex Parte Quirin (1942).
NLRB v Jones &Laughlin Steel (1937) is a very significant case insofar as it was decided
immediately following Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and his threat to pack the Court, along with the fact that it
overturned precedent set by the previous case of Hammer v Dagenhart (Finn, Jacobson, Komers 256).The
question brought before the Court in this case was whether or not Congress under its power to regulate
commerce could make labor regulations. This case substantially expanded the powers that Congress has to
regulate commerce, by establishing what became known as “The Stream of Commerce”. The Court said
that the regulation of commerce cannot be made in bits and pieces, but rather must be regulated as a whole;
from the commercial transaction to the transportation to the manufacturing to production all the way down
338