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Source:  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,757299,00.html?iid=chix-sphere

The Big Debate

Monday, Mar. 01, 1937
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(See front cover)

Though no committee of Congress had yet begun hearings on it, the great debate on President Roosevelt's proposals to reform the Judiciary and, incidentally, to alter the Supreme Court, last week burst prematurely open in full Senate. First Tennessee's windy McKellar, then Arizona's courtly Ashurst, with interpolations by thunderous Majority Leader Robinson, shook the air with preliminary salvos. Reason: even before the historic Supreme Court Battle of 1937 began, the Administration was losing ground.

"Oh Kaaay." Senator Ashurst, the soul of oldtime gallantry, would hardly be so rude as to argue against a lady, but it so happened that the arguments he rose to refute were last week most strikingly expressed by a woman. Columnist Dorothy Thompson (whose husband, Sinclair Lewis, wrote It Can't Happen Here) wrote:

"No people ever recognize their Dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. . . . Since the great American tradition is freedom and democracy you can bet that our dictator, God help us! will be a great democrat, through whose leadership alone democracy can be realized. And nobody will ever say 'Help to him or 'Ave Caesar' nor will they call him 'Führer' or 'Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike blat of 'O. K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaay!'"

Others put the argument in different fashion. Explaining his position to the Indiana General Assembly, Representative Samuel B. Pettengill of South Bend, wrote: "A packed jury, a packed Court and a stacked deck of cards are on the same moral plane. ... It is more power than a good man should want or a bad man should have."

In a national broadcast Senator Burton K. Wheeler cried: "Every labor leader, every farmer and every progressive-minded citizen in the United States would have been shocked and protested from the housetops if President Harding, President Coolidge or President Hoover had even intimated that they wanted to increase the Supreme Court so as to make it subservient to their wishes. The progressives would have said, and rightly so, that it was fundamentally unsound, morally wrong and an attempt to set up a dictatorship in this country."

"I Marvel." When Senator Ashurst rose last week in the Senate, he was interrupted by Senator Bailey of North Carolina who asked whether Mr. Ashurst did not say after the Supreme Court's NIRA decision that among the "unjust criticisms" leveled at the President was the charge that he intended to enlarge the Court. Senator Ashurst at that time said: "A more ridiculous, absurd and unjust criticism of a President was never made. No person whose opinion is respected has favored attempting such a reckless theory and policy."

Unabashed, Mr. Ashurst now replied: "It is obvious from the record that that is my utterance. The rhetoric alone carries its proof. . . . The man who attempts to be consistent in his public service may end up consistent indeed, but never accomplish anything else."