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Column: What FDR could advise Biden about reforming the Supreme Court — tread lightly
If it’s true that as Mark Twain supposedly said, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes, then we are about to embark on a poetry slam for the ages, with the Supreme Court as its theme.
President Biden on Monday unveiled a package of proposals to rein in a court that has seen public confidence reach a low ebb not recorded by the Gallup Organization in readings dating back to 1973.
Most significantly, he is calling for 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices and the imposition by Congress of binding conduct and ethics rules requiring the justices to “disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest.”
Term limits would… make timing for Court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary; and reduce the chance that any single Presidency imposes undue influence for generations to come.
— President Biden on his Supreme Court reform plan
He is also proposing a constitutional amendment to neutralize a court decision appearing to give former presidents immunity for crimes committed while in office.
The template for these proposals is Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 plan to “pack” the court by allowing presidents to appoint a new justice when any sitting justice failed to resign or retire within six months of turning 70, up to a maximum of six new justices.
The manifest goal was to dilute the influence of a cadre or conservative justices who had overruled almost every New Deal law or regulation that had come before them, as well as several other measures.
If FDR could counsel Biden today, he might warn him to move carefully; FDR’s court-packing scheme went down in flames amid congressional opposition, cut deeply into the popularity that had brought him a landslide reelection victory in the 1936 election, and brought the New Deal to a screeching halt. It also represented a moment in which FDR lost his unique ability to gauge the popular mood and act upon it.
The politics of Supreme Court reform today resemble those of 1937 in many ways, though as Twain’s supposed quip suggests, there are significant differences. Let’s look at the differences first.
Roosevelt was then at the outset of his second term, riding high on an electoral victory that may have given him a greater sense of his political omnipotence than he actually possessed. Biden, of course, is less than six months away from the end of his presidency. Roosevelt could look ahead at four more years of policymaking; Biden may be more focused on cementing his legacy of progressive achievements by bequeathing the nation a reformed Supreme Court.
Both presidents may have felt they had nothing to lose by taking on what seemed to be the most revered of the three branches of government, albeit for different reasons — Roosevelt because nothing could chip away at his popularity, Biden because his own term in office can’t be affected by the fate of his reform proposals.
Roosevelt was faulted for springing his scheme on an unsuspecting public and Congress. Notwithstanding public discontent with the court, its reform hadn’t been an issue in the presidential campaign recently ended. FDR had not spoken publicly about the court after a series of anti-New Deal rulings in 1935 and 1936 except after one ruling in which he accused the court of relegating the country to “the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.”
Instead, he blindsided the nation by announcing his plan in a speech on Feb. 5. To his surprise, voters and legislators — including reliable New Deal supporters on Capitol Hill — reacted with fury.
It was not merely the secrecy in which the scheme had been plotted that its critics found dismaying. FDR’s stated rationale, which was that the aging justices were overworked and needed help to manage their docket, was transparently deceptive.
That rationale might have looked superficially reasonable at first, since the oldest member of the court’s so-called Four Conservative Horsemen, Willis Van Devanter, had been born during the administration of James Buchanan, which supposedly rendered him utterly out of step with the politics of the 1930s.
However, the oldest justice on the court, Louis Brandeis, was even older — at 80, he had been born during the administration of Franklin Pierce, Buchanan’s predecessor, but nevertheless was the court’s liberal lion and not an impediment to the New Deal.
Biden seems to have absorbed the lessons of FDR’s failed effort. He has been telegraphing for weeks that he is contemplating Supreme Court reforms. His proposals are not as radical as expanding the court outright, but they address some of the most evident issues driving the court’s public standing into the sub-basement: a conservative majority that has shown no respect for values and rights long cherished by most Americans, and a record of financial grifting and overt partisanship, chiefly by conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
As in 1937, there is a sense that the court has taken aim at progressive principles and laws, running roughshod over individual rights.
The court’s direction has been led by a conservative majority including three judges appointed by Donald Trump — among them Neil M. Gorsuch, who slid into a seat kept open by Senate Republicans’ refusal to even consider Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the late Antonin Scalia’s seat; and Amy Coney Barrett, rushed to confirmation by Senate Republicans in October 2020 only 38 days before the election that would unseat Trump and bring Biden to the White House.
Barrett took the seat vacated by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the most liberal justices ever to sit on the court.
The three Trump judges were in the majority that in 2022 overturned Roe vs. Wade, the decision that had protected women’s reproductive health rights since 1973.
It may be useful to compare the court’s behavior in recent years with what provoked FDR into launching his court-packing scheme.
The court’s distaste for elements of the New Deal was assumed as the Roosevelt administration proceeded to remake the U.S. economy. But it didn’t become palpable until it issued three decisions on May 27, 1935, a date that would become known to progressives as “Black Monday.”
In the first decision, the court overturned Roosevelt’s ouster of a reactionary member of the Federal Trade Commission, placing a limit on a president’s authority over executive officers. The court then invalidated a farm mortgage law because it applied to existing mortgages, not just new ones. Then came the court’s invalidation of the National Recovery Administration, through which the government had tried to regiment competition throughout the economy to help dig the country out of the Depression.
All three decisions were unanimous, but they still signaled that a conservative cadre was poised to undermine New Deal initiatives due to come before the justices. In 1936, the court narrowed the authority of the Securities and Exchange Commission and invalidated a relief program for coal companies. Most significantly, it overturned a New York minimum wage law in a decision known as Tipaldo, after its detestable protagonist, the owner of a laundry who had been cheating his laundresses of their legal wages.
Condemnation of the Tipaldo decision came from across the entire political spectrum. “If this decision does not outrage the moral sense of the country, then nothing will,” FDR’s Interior secretary, Harold Ickes, wrote in his diary. Conservatives were dismayed that the decision undercut their argument that labor rights should remain in the hands of the states — how could that be, if the Supreme Court had overturned a state minimum wage law?
Roosevelt and his fellow progressives foresaw that the court would invalidate the entire New Deal. For a time, FDR seemed content to let that happen, reasoning that it would help him get a constitutional amendment enacted that would allow Congress to save any law the court deemed unconstitutional by reenacting it. If the court kept overturning the New Deal, he reasoned, there would be “marching farmers and marching miners and marching workingmen throughout the land.”
In the end, he chose to go with the court-packing scheme, recognizing that it fit within the constitutional provision giving Congress the unquestioned right to dictate the size of the court.
For many Americans today, the court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe vs. Wade has supplanted its 1857 Dred Scott decision as the worst in its history. By relegating abortion to a state-level decision, Dobbs has spawned a patchwork of punitive state laws that have life-threatening ramifications for pregnant women (among many other shortcomings).
Public distaste for Dobbs, as was the case with Tipaldo, has been manifest. Since it was handed down in June 2022, every single state initiative to protect women’s reproductive rights has prevailed at the ballot box. The chief weapons in the antiabortion camp’s quiver have been efforts to stymie referendum and initiative votes by changing the ballot box rules, as has been tried in Florida and Ohio.
Biden’s proposal to establish staggered 18-year terms for justices has several virtues. One is that it would rebalance a court on which GOP appointees are arguably overrepresented. From 1960 through this year, Republicans held the White House for 32 years and Democrats for 31, almost an even split. But in that period, Republicans have appointed 15 justices and Democrats only ten. Under Biden’s proposal, every president would have the opportunity to appoint two justices during each four-year term.
“Term limits would … make timing for Court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary; and reduce the chance that any single Presidency imposes undue influence for generations to come,” the Biden White House says.
The one flaw in the proposal is that it could require a constitutional amendment. The Constitution states that federal justices may serve “during good behavior,” but expert opinion is divided over whether that bars Congress from imposing any other conditions on their service.
It’s worth noting that the Supreme Court was so unnerved by the groundswell of criticism it faced after Tipaldo that Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes engineered an about-face, orchestrating a 5-4 opinion upholding a Washington state minimum wage law that was almost identical to the New York law it had overturned, also by 5 to 4. That helped to take the wind out of FDR’s scheme. The change would forever be known as “the switch in time that saved nine.” The court never overturned another New Deal initiative.
But few such opportunities for an about-face are on the horizon. The damage this court has done to individual rights and the rule of law is manifest. Biden’s sense is that the time is ripe for reform, and that this time the public may go along.
Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
As of Wednesday, 86% of votes were in favor of Measure NDC, the city ban, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.
Other cities and towns have passed moratoriums on data centers, as a wave of opposition sweeps the country. But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction.
Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an outpouring of public anger and concern. The developer withdrew that plan.
That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and would have used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city. Residents said it would have caused noise and air pollution and driven up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates.”
The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, expressed disappointment in the vote.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said.
“It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.”
SGV Progressive Action worked with hyperlocal groups including No Data Center Monterey Park to rally support for the measure.
The group is now focused on stopping data center proposals in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives.
City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A., are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers, and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities.
Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third-most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in other hotspots.
That doesn’t mean opposition hasn’t been fierce. In Coachella and Imperial County, residents are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update.
Wong said she hoped the ballot measure vote would galvanize the opposition. “The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future.”
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
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