Roosevelt Rends the Constitution!

[PoliticalChic]

Note: I believe that this belongs in "Law" because the Constitution is known as 'the law of the land.'

It was.
Until Franklin Roosevelt emasculated it.





I am frequently inspired to construct an OP by some Leftist on the board who says something really stupid...or is that redundant?....but never more so than by a recent such individual who freely unfurled his true colors.

"Karl Marx had a number of good ideas. I am glad we adopted many of them. "
http://www.usmessageboard.com/history/341816-harry-truman-quo-vadis-4.html

...and....when I stated that Franklin Roosevelt shred the Constitution, he wrote:

"How did he shred the Constitution? Quote the specific passages of the Constitution that he violated, and explain how he violated them." http://www.usmessageboard.com/history/341816-harry-truman-quo-vadis-3.html





Well, then, let's begin.

1. Madison wrote, in Federalist #47, "No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." The Federalist #47

Therein lies the indictment of Roosevelt's actions vis-a-vis the Constitution.



2. Here's how it happened:

In 1937, Roosevelt tried to pack the judiciary, stuff more Liberals and KKKers on the Supreme Court, and in 1938 attempted to purge Democrat Senators who defeated the scheme.

While his tactic failed, his strategy succeeded: he made cowards of the Justices, effectively doing away with the 'checks and balances' provided by an independent Supreme Court.

a. Democrat Senator Ashurst of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, denounced court packing as a "prelude to tyranny," but, when Roosevelt announced it, Ashurst issued a one-line statement late that afternoon saying he was in "favor of the President's proposal."
"No Senator can change his mind quicker than I."
Henry F. Ashurst - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Talk about Lock-step Liberals.

b. Conservative Democrat Carter Glass of Virginia, explained it as follows: "Why, if the President asked Congress to commit suicide tomorrow they'd do it."
Sound like the ObamaCare vote?




3. Lest any believe that Roosevelt's actions were less than design, he himself disclosed in his first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1933, that his idea of leadership had no boundary, and, in fact, did not exclude dictatorship. He made clear that if Congress did not follow his orders, "I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for.... -broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.... for discipline and direction under leadership." p.64

a. From Congressional hearings, 1973:
“Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency.”
Freedomsite.net

B. Other tyrants, the same:
"Obama vows to act alone if Congress doesn't cooperate" Obama vows to act alone if Congress doesn't cooperate | recordonline.com


Constitution be damned!


So....when one thinks about it, essentially, in the recent election, 65,899,660 voters cast their ballot for a monarchy, and against the Constitution.

 

[PoliticalChic]

4. January 3, 1936, Roosevelt bragged that he had "new instruments of public power" to battle challenges...plans for extra-constitutional powers:

" ...more menacing than merely a return to the past—bad as that would be. Our resplendent economic autocracy does not want to return to that individualism of which they prate, even though the advantages under that system went to the ruthless and the strong. They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people's Government this power is wholesome and proper. "
Franklin D. Roosevelt: Annual Message to Congress





Besides extra-constitutional powers, he sneers at the Constitution itself:

5. In July 5, 1935, in a letter to Representative Samuel B. Hill of Washington, the President manifested his contempt for the Constitution.
Hill was chairman of the subcommittee studying the Guffey-Vinson bill to regulate the coal industry: the purpose of the legislation was to re-establish, for the coal industry, the NRA code system which the Supreme Court had unanimously declared unconstitutional.

Roosevelt wrote: "I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the legislation."
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=14894

This was the same Roosevelt who had sworn an oath on his 300 year old family Bible, to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Chesly Manly, "The Twenty Year Revolution," p. 65.





6. BTW.... Roosevelt lost that battle, but won the war. On April 12, 1937, the United States ceased to be a republic of limited constitutional government. The Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Labor Relations Act. No longer would the enumerated powers of the Constitution apply....now we would be a European model welfare state, in which the national legislature has power to regulate industry, agriculture, and virtually all the activities of the citizens. The coda came when the court upheld the Social Security Act on May 24, 1937, and, then, the compulsory marketing quotas of the new AAA, on April 17, 1936. p. 68-69

a. Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), former U.S. government agency established (1933) in the Dept. of Agriculture under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal program. Its purpose was to help farmers by reducing production of staple crops, thus raising farm prices and encouraging more diversified farming. Farmers were given benefit payments in return for limiting acreage given to staple crops; in the case of cotton and tobacco coercive taxes forced (1934–35) farmers to cut the amounts that they marketed.
Agricultural Adjustment Administration | Infoplease.com





7. In 1935, the Supreme Court upheld the New Deal repudiation of gold payments in government contracts and private contracts .... Justice McReynolds declared in a dissenting opinion that "the Constitution as we have known it is gone."
The Brookshire Times ? 1 March 1935 ? Page 2 - Newspapers.com



Has the case against Roosevelt, for murdering the Constitution, been proven?

 

[PoliticalChic]

8. To see the abject cowardice of the Justices, note that in invalidating the Guffey-Vinson Coal Act on May 18, 1936, less than a year before Roosevelt attempted to pack the court, Justice Charles Evans Hughes said that federal laws restricting local labor relations provisions were unconstitutional, that "the relations of employer and employee is a local relation" and "the evils are all local evils over which the federal government has no legislative control."

He went on to say "Otherwise in view of the multitude of indirect effects Congress in its discretion could assume control of virtually all of the activities of the people to the subversion of the fundamental principles of the Constitution." And..."... it is not for the court to amend the Constitution by judicial decision."


Atta boy, Hughes!!!

The US Constitution is inviolable!!!


Sort of......



9. Proof of Roosevelt's total control of another branch of government came just eleven months later: Chief Justice Hughes, spoke for the majority in finding the Wagner Labor Relations Act constitutional.
Yes, he said...Congress could regulate labor relations in manufacturing plants.


Roosevelt destroys the independence of the Supreme Court.



An America without checks and balances.

 

[PoliticalChic]

10 Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was a Marxist intellectual whose main legacy arises through his departures from orthodox Marxism. He concurred with Marx as to class warfare, but sought the destruction of society as the precondition for the eventual victory of global Marxism.

Gramschi’s motto is that of liberals today: “that all life is "political." John Fonte -- Why There Is A Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America



The irrevocable alteration that Franklin Roosevelt wreaked on this nation, in effect, was what Gramschi wrote.....government elites can stick their nose into, control, regulate, order, anything they so choose.
Hardly the limited constitutional government that our Founders gave this nation.

It ended...thanks to Franklin Roosevelt.



So.....if you like your healthcare........

 

[HelenaHandbag]

Wilson and the Wall Street progressives put the ball on the tee.

 

[Spoonman]

the constitution is very clear with language like congress shall pass no laws, shall not be infringed. but how many laws are passed, how many laws infringe. its all a power grab by government to suppress the people

 

[PoliticalChic]

Of course, giving the benefit of the doubt, Franklin Roosevelt surely had only the finest of motives in his disregard of the Constitution. After all, Roosevelt was an honorable man;
So were they all, the New Dealers, all honorable men—



What happens when such honorable men disregard the written law....I mean, even if one's motives are only for the best interests of the people one governs?





In his novel, "The Unlikely Spy," Daniel Silva writes of a brilliant law student, one predicted to, one day, sit on the Reichsgerict, Germany's Supreme Court, who decries an eerily similar scenario to that which unfolded in this thread.....


"Hitler changed all of that. Hitler believed in the rule of men, not the rule of law. Within months of taking power he turned Germany's entire judicial system upside down.

Führergewalt. - Führer power- became the absolute law of the land, and Hitler's every maniacal whim was immediately translated into codes and regulations.

Vogel remembered some of the ridiculous maxims coined by the architects of Hitler's legal overhaul of Germany: 'Law is what is useful to the German people! Law must be interpreted through healthy folk emotions!'

When the normal judiciary stood in their way the Nazis established their own courts- Volksgerichtshof, the People's Courts.

...in October 1933, when 10,000 lawyers stood on the steps of the Reichsgericht in Leipzig, arms raised in the Nazi salute, and swore 'to follow the course of the Führer to the end of our days.'"



It has a familiar ring to it....does it not?