In 2005, then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) delivered a Senate floor speech about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s doomed 1937 plan to “pack” the U.S. Supreme Court. FDR’s plan would have permitted him to add six justices, immediately securing a pro-New Deal judicial majority. But “in an act of great courage, Roosevelt’s own party stood up against this institutional power grab,” Biden recounted 16 years ago. “They did not agree with the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, but they believed that Roosevelt was wrong to seek to defy established traditions as a way of stopping that activism.”
