California's Prop 8 Denying Homosexual Marriage Ruling

PrintSmith wrote: Yeah, I know it is old news, but it is still accurate news nonetheless. That is precisely what FDR and the super-majority of Democrats in Congress threatened to do - seat their own justices if the current court continued to apply the Constitution to the laws that the New Deal Democrats were passing.

No, it's the same ol' twisted slanted Sovereign Citizen silly-news... Are you ready for your closeup, Mr. Bonaparte?

:Snooze

I don't know which of you is right but I'll side with PS since LJ didn't say anything to prove him wrong....it could be an interesting discussion if BOTH were willing to bring more than half-assed insults.

We've been through this before, and I pasted 3 pages of sources... You can either spend your time searching for that interchange, or you can assume I don't have sources... (You would be wrong.) I'm tired of fighting the same ol' tiresome ideological battles with someone who lives in a revisionist-history/fantasy world.

I frankly don't care which you believe... But here's a hint: Everybody except the Sovereign Citizens loonies believes the source material I posted...

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And frankly, it has nothing to do with the Ninth Circuit declaring that Prop-8 is unconstitutional, does it....

PrintSmith wrote: Which is a way of saying that yes, the decision referenced was made after the Democrats in the executive and legislative branches told the judicial branch that unless they started playing ball they were going to seat their own justices to get the outcome they favored regardless of what the law as established by the Constitution was.

Possibly not...

The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937[1] (frequently called the "court-packing plan")[2] was a legislative initiative proposed by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to add more justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Roosevelt's purpose was to obtain favorable rulings regarding New Deal legislation that had been previously ruled unconstitutional.[3] The central and most controversial provision of the bill would have granted the President power to appoint an additional Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, up to a maximum of six, for every sitting member over the age of 70 years and 6 months.

Roosevelt's initiative ultimately failed due to adverse public opinion, the retirement of one Supreme Court Justice, and the unexpected and sudden death of the legislation's U.S. Senate champion: Senate Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson. It exposed the limits of Roosevelt's abilities to push forward legislation through direct public appeal and, in contrast to the tenor of his public presentations of his first-term, was seen as political maneuvering.[10][11] Although circumstances ultimately allowed Roosevelt to prevail in establishing a majority on the court friendly to his New Deal agenda, some scholars have concluded that the President's victory was a pyrrhic one.[11]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_P ... ll_of_1937

Not quite the coup that you seem to be talking about.

The threat was sufficient to "encourage" the justices to declare Social Security constitutional - an act which used virtually an identical scheme to fund it as was used in the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was declared to be an unconstitutional use of Congress' delegated power to lay and collect taxes just prior to the issuance of the threat from the executive and legislative branches of the government - which all happened to be firmly in control of New Deal Democrats at the time. One could easily, given the facts, reason that it was unnecessary to carry out the threat given that the desired affect was achieved without resorting to carrying out the substance of the threat, which was what eventually led to the request from FDR not being passed into law.

As a demonstration, let us say that you arm yourself with a shotgun after hearing a noise in your home in the dead of night. As you are investigating the source of the noise, you come across a burglar in your home. If you tell the burglar to leave immediately or you will shoot him dead, and the burglar immediately leaves, is it not to be presumed that the burglar left because of the threat that was issued and the means of carrying out the threat if necessary were in obvious view? As a result of the 1936 elections FDR was chosen as president and both houses of Congress contained representation from the party of Democrats well in excess of 2/3 of their totals (nearly 80% in the Senate and in excess of 76% in the House). As it would only require a simple majority in both houses to pass the "court packing" plan of FDR, and only a simple majority of Senators to confirm new justices with which to pack the court, the court was, for all intents and purposes, looking down the barrel of a loaded gun unless it took heed of the threat is was under and started, in the words of FDR's fireside chat on the subject, pulling in concert with the other two horses.