Can States Make Their Own Laws? by Acks Alex;

Author:Acks, Alex;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Enslow Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

During the Great Depression, unemployed men came to the United States Capitol to appeal for federal aid.

On October 24, 1929, investors began to dump overpriced stock shares, causing the value to drop quickly. This became known as “Black Thursday.”5 Bank crashes and an economic depression followed, with massive unemployment. The depression continued for years and may have been extended by national economic policies.6

Two and a half years after the Great Depression started, Franklin D. Roosevelt (often called FDR) was selected by the Democratic Party to be their presidential candidate for the election of 1932. In his acceptance speech, FDR said, “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”7

After his election, FDR worked to make his new deal a reality. He got the Congress to pass two wide-ranging packages of “New Deal” bills that included bank reforms, aid packages for business and struggling people, work programs, and controls on things like how much farm goods had to be bought for. Many programs that still exist today like Social Security and unemployment protection came from the New Deal.8

Was the New Deal Constitutional?

Until 1937, the Supreme Court ruled that almost every New Deal law that was challenged by states and businesses was actually unconstitutional. The government tried to argue that the programs fell under the commerce and taxation clauses of the Constitution, but the court felt that those powers did not cover industrial regulation or social and economic reforms.12–14

Sick Chickens Versus the New Deal

Before the “switch in time that saved the nine,” there was A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, also known as the “sick chicken case.”9 Under new regulations created by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), Schechter Poultry was charged with multiple counts of “the sale to a butcher of an unfit chicken,” as well as violations of minimum wage laws. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided that NIRA was an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution because the regulations were viewed as Congress giving legislative power to the executive branch.10 NIRA was important to the New Deal, and the “sick chicken case” was one of the reasons FDR began to look at packing the court as a solution.11

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