http://thefederalist.com/2014/12/04/the-supreme-courts-reign-of-terror-1937-1944/The Supreme Court’s Reign Of Terror, 1937-1944
A flood of Supreme Court decisions between 1937 and 1944 completely reordered American society and the Constitution itself.
By Greg Scandlen
December 4, 2014
From time to time, some of us wonder how we got here. We hear quaint expressions like “freedom of contract” and ask, whatever happened to that? How is it that two people are no longer allowed to enter into an enforceable contract without running afoul of some government restriction?
A recent example is that I can no longer agree to a contract with a health insurance company that does not cover contraceptives. Why? If I and an insurance company are both willing to sign such a contract, how is it that the government says we cannot?
This and many, many more restrictions on freedom came about during a seven-year (1937-1944) reign of terror by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Supreme Court that shredded all traditional understandings of the Constitution’s limits on federal power. It began with Social Security, went on to eliminate freedom of contract, expand the Commerce Clause, and redefine the meaning of insurance, all in the service of the Progressive movement to put an elite bureaucracy in charge of all economic activity in the United States
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