Take them on, on your own

In the original spirit of The Chorography, as a place to bring any and all relevant and not-so-relevant things to each other's attention, I present you with The Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937:

The Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937, frequently called the court-packing plan,[1] was a legislative initiative to add more justices to the Supreme Court proposed by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt shortly after his victory in the 1936 presidential election. Although the bill aimed generally to overhaul and modernize all of the federal court system, its central and most controversial provision would have granted the President power to appoint an additional Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court for every sitting member over the age of 70½, up to a maximum of six.

Crazy stuff, especially for someone whose knowledge of New Deal history is fragmentary at best. Roosevelt got beat to shit over the court-packing plan, as it was a fairly blatant attempt to overcome a number of unfavorable rulings the Supreme Court had handed him through his first term, but it's interesting to me to compare this kind of legislative tactic with, well, anything Obama has done. I only came about this while reading Path to Power, a book about yet another progressive/left-of-centre president with ambitious plans for the federal government, and as bad as Johnson (and, to some extent, Roosevelt) come off looking, the sheer ball-sack that they brought to the table in the pursuit of a progressive agenda is pretty impressive. I suppose you could argue that they lived and operated at a time when organizing legislative/populist resistance to liberalism was harder or that modern partisanship would paralyze any president, no matter how persuasive or assertive he or she may be. That said, reading about Johnson and Roosevelt isn't doing a lot to convince me that Obama is a leader in their mould. Whether that's a good thing, I guess, is something we should debate.