The Hughes Court

In early 1930, President Herbert Hoover nominated Charles Evan Hughes to replace Taft as Chief Justice. After practicing law for two decades, Hughes served two terms as governor of New York. He was then appointed by President Taft to the Supreme Court, where he served as an associate justice for six years before resigning his seat in 1916 to run as the Republican Party candidate for president. After losing a close election to Woodrow Wilson, Hughes returned to private law practice, but he later accepted appointments as secretary of state and as U.S. delegate to an international Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Netherlands.

When Hughes returned to the Supreme Court in 1930, the country was struggling to come to grips with the economic consequences of the stock market crash of October 1929. Despite President Herbert Hoover's promise that a return to prosperity was "just around the corner," the nation remained mired in a depression, and Franklin Roosevelt was elected to provide Americans a "New Deal." By June 1933, Congress had passed a host of economic legislation intended to turn the economy around.

However, a number of affected industries mounted legal challenges to the New Deal legislation, and they found an ally in the Supreme Court. Led by a solid bloc of conservative justices known as the "Four Horsemen," the Court repeatedly struck down numerous components of the New Deal. Indicative of the Court's approach was the 1935 case of Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States. In his opinion, Chief Justice Hughes, writing for a unanimous Court, declared that significant portions of the National Industrial Recovery Act represented an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the executive branch. At the same time, Hughes also continued the Court's practice of drawing narrow distinctions between "direct" and "indirect" effects of interstate commerce, restricting congressional authority under the Commerce Clause to fashion a program for economic recovery.

The Court's obstructionist approach to the New Deal frustrated President Roosevelt immensely, resulting in the infamous "court-packing" proposal of 1937, described in the Federalism Timeline. Despite public and congressional opposition to Roosevelt's plan, the "Four Horsemen" recognized that they were out of step with the national consensus behind the New Deal and began to consider retirement as an attractive option. By the time Chief Justice Hughes stepped down in 1941, Roosevelt had appointed five new justices to the Supreme Court, and he would soon add two more, all of whom were willing to give Congress considerable latitude in the area of economic regulation.