Senate Defeats FDR Court-Packing Plan 70-22, Handing Roosevelt His Greatest Legislative Defeat

On July 22, 1937, the U.S. Senate votes 70-22 to defeat President Franklin Roosevelt’s Judicial Procedures Reform Bill, rejecting his proposal to expand the Supreme Court by up to six additional justices and handing FDR his greatest legislative defeat. Three-quarters of senators voting to kill the court-packing plan are Democrats, representing a stunning rebuke from Roosevelt’s own party just months after his landslide 1936 re-election victory. The Senate’s final vote follows the June 14, 1937 Senate Judiciary Committee report that condemned the measure as “a needless, futile and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle” and “an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this Country”—with seven Democrats signing the scathing adverse recommendation despite the committee’s Democratic majority.

The bill’s defeat culminates months of intense opposition from Republicans, conservative Democrats, and judicial independence advocates who successfully framed Roosevelt’s constitutional exercise of congressional authority to set Court size as an assault on separation of powers. The plan’s already slim chances collapse in mid-July when Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson of Arkansas—the bill’s chief Senate lobbyist—suffers a fatal heart attack two weeks into floor debate, eliminating the legislative tactician who might have salvaged a compromise. Vice President John Nance Garner, who loathed the court-packing proposal from its February 5 announcement, sees his prediction of party disharmony realized as the Democratic coalition fractures. By late July, Roosevelt concedes defeat and agrees to drop the bill, with the Senate formally tabling it for good.

The court-packing fight’s outcome paradoxically represents both Roosevelt’s greatest legislative failure and his ultimate judicial victory—he “lost the battle but won the war.” Justice Owen Roberts’ famous “switch in time that saved nine” sees the Court begin upholding New Deal legislation even before the plan’s defeat, with NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp (1937) signaling the Court’s retreat from its narrow “horse-and-buggy” Commerce Clause interpretation. Justice Willis Van Devanter’s May 1937 retirement announcement gives Roosevelt his first Court appointment opportunity, and by 1942 FDR names eight justices plus one chief justice, completely remaking the Court’s ideological composition. However, the court-packing battle permanently damages Roosevelt’s relationship with Congress, as an anti-New Deal conservative coalition forms that blocks his social reform agenda after 1937. The episode demonstrates how even popular presidents with strong congressional majorities face institutional constraints on democratic reforms, while also showing that sustained political pressure can shift judicial interpretation without formal Court expansion—lessons relevant to ongoing debates about Supreme Court legitimacy and reform.