Maggie's Farm

In February 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent to Congress a bill to change the composition of the federal judiciary. This “court?packing bill,” as it was promptly dubbed, was FDR's attempt to expand the membership of the Supreme Court so that he could nominate justices who would uphold the constitutionality of New Deal legislation. The court?packing struggle constitutes a critical episode in Roosevelt's presidency and one of the bitterest clashes between the judiciary and the executive in American history.

(read more @

http://www.answers.com/topic/court-packing-plan

Amity Schlaes in The Forgotten Man holds that the constant starting an stopping of first this plan and then that plan, never letting anything stabilize or show measurable let alone repeatable results, is the over-arching reason the Depression would not lift, and did not, until WWII blew out the paradigm and saved FDR's bacon.

IMHO, the merits of stability are so intuitive that deliberately breaching them in what seems to've been an arbitrary and capricious manner, constitutes a sort of mens rea evidence that FDR wanted first to socialize America and was deliberately sabotaging with uncertainty all nascent recovery movements, via instability masked as "activist hard-work-at-finding-solutions", until such time as he had exhausted the possibilities of that hidden agenda first order of business.

As with Obama, his mere approach as a candidate in the run up to an election was enought to collapse confidence sufficiently to crash already toppy (tho perhaps but as usual temporarily so) markets, and give them both the perfect start: the crisis already unfolding under a predecessor from the other party, opening up the vastest possible stage for hijacking the restrictions that are the heart of the intent of the founder's Constitution.