Boj o reformu Nejvyššího soudu USA a jeho význam pro stát a právo Spojených států

The era of the Thirties was most crucial for the modern constitutional history of the United States. During the Roosevelt’s New Deal – there came the most vigorous constitutional conflict between the President and the U. S. Supreme Court. The forces of progressivism and reformism rallied behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt attempted to the utmost to assert the J. M. Keynes’s principles of controlled economy and clashed with the extreme conservative and reactionary group at that time represented in the governing bodies by a majority of the Justices and many senators and congressmen. These were only concerned with preserving in the U.S.A. the economical, political and legal order as it developed in the years before the turn of the century and in the first twenty years of the present century. In the years 1934–1936 the Supreme Court began to scrutinize some of the Roosevelt’s New Deal enactments and decided that these were unconstitutional and void. Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936 and the following year he proposed a bill which would have the effect of increasing the Court’s membership sufficiently to provide a majority of liberal minded Justices (under the pretext that the average age of Justices was high) and thus would practically invalidate the Supreme Court as one of the counterbalancing agents of the federal government. But his project found a vigorous criticism not only among the diehards but it was disliked even by liberal and leftist groups, by progressive scientists and journalists who had endorsed the President and his policies up till now. They feared – not without reason – that the executive power of the President would no more be subject to the restraints imposed by the Supreme Court and might well turn towards dictatorship. After a bitter struggle in Congress, the bill never went through, however this great Court battle left a permanent mark upon the American constitutional life. The Court’s rulings began to show an important more liberal trend in favor of the President and partly Congress too. Thus the decisions on some most important constitutional questions in fact, got out of the hands of the Supreme Court. The power of the President and that of the Congress to control national economy, the relations between the national and state governments (especially the safeguards of the rights of states) and in general questions as to the limits of constitutional powers held by the executive and the legislature were the principal questions. The outcome of the battle which the President waged for the reform of the Supreme Court and the work of the Supreme Court itself during the last thirty years seem to confirm the following hypothesis: this was by far not a battle between progressive and conservative forces wherein afterwards the matter were restored to status quo ante, but that this conflict also had a prominent institutional character. Roosevelt s “constitutional revolution” made possible an unusual aggrandizement of the power of the federal government (in the first place of the executive power) in all fields of the politic and public life. On the other hand, it exerted a beneficial influence on the work of the U. S. Supreme Court in the sphere of civil rights and liberties and brought about the formulation of many progressive constitutional doctrines.