Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, February 5th is the day, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt announces a plan

to expand the Supreme Court to as many as 15 judges, allegedly to make it more efficient. The plan would allow the president to

nominate an additional judge to the court for every sitting judge who had served

at least 10 years had reached the age of 70 years and did not step down

within six months of this announcement.

If approved by Congress, the legislation would have given

FDR up to six new appointments to the Supreme Court.

This was all in the wake of the Supreme Court undercutting a number of Roosevelt's progressive

New Deal reforms during his first term in office, and now here we are February 1937 after a landslide victory and what he felt was a clear

mandate from voters for his progressive agenda. Roosevelt is going for it.

The Supreme Court was in his crosshairs. So let's talk about an emboldened FDR's plan to pack the court, expand the court, and how it kind of didn't work. It kind of completely backfire. So let's get into it here as always Nicole

Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.

Hello Jody. Hey there. Can I read that thing that I read in the intro a

little bit which is a sort of contours of his plan?

So he says, this would allow himself, the president, to nominate an additional judge for every judge who had served at least 10 years and was at least 70 years old and that would give him six new appointments up possibly.

So you know all this grumbling we have now about how everyone's too old, same as it ever was apparently.

Because when you cut it down after six months,

if you turned 70 had served 10 years and didn't retire,

then, okay, we get one more judge. So gosh all these old people clinging

onto their house not a new not a new complaint I suppose. The gerontocracy has

...