After getting smacked down repeatedly by the Supreme Court in the early years of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt began pushing Congress to increase the size of the Supreme Court from nine Justices to fifteen. The President, of course, would get to choose the people who would get the six newly-created seats, and this made Congress very nervous. FDR never did get his six additional Justices, and the Court continued to undermine his efforts to implement the New Deal.
I am here to tell you that FDR had exactly the right idea. Here's why.
With nine Justices, it is fairly easy for a President with a compliant Congress to change the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court in just a few years. A particularly partisan President with a radical agenda could game the system by selecting likewise partisan candidates for consideration by the Senate. Not only that, such a President could make sure none of the candidates were older than, say, 50. Given current average life-expectancy, we would then have to live with the results for decades.
Now say there were FDR's magic number of fifteen Justices. The size of the court is set by Congress, not the Constitution, so changing the number of seats would be a simple matter of passing a bill for the President to sign into law. Assuming a vigilant Senate with a close partisan split and a President more interested in a diverse Court than the ideology of his political party who could be trusted to pick six well-qualified and politically neutral candidates, the effect of going from nine to fifteen Justices would be to dilute the influence what is currently the right wing majority. More importantly, it would be harder, even for a two-term President, to stack the court one way or the other. That would require a political movement with sufficient staying power to retain strong majorities in Congress and the Presidency for a generation or more. Not even the conservative movement of the 1980-2006 was able to manage that.
Assuming we get a middle-of-the-road Democrat in the White House in 2009 - a strong possiblity - we could pull this off if we make the right arguments. I just gave you all a couple of good ones right here.