Book of the week: Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court by Jeff Shesol

(Norton, 640 pages, $27.95)

It might surprise you that a book about a fleeting 1930s political battle could provide serious entertainment, said Richard Posner in The New Republic. But Jeff Shesol’s fat new account of President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed 1937 attempt to add up to six seats to the U.S. Supreme Court is both “splendid to read” and amazingly timely. President Obama, like FDR, is a liberal president with a healthy congressional majority and an ambitious agenda—and, like FDR, he’s faced with a Supreme Court that seems “more than willing” to oppose him, should the opportunity arise. Roosevelt’s outrageous solution was an attempt to water down the court’s conservative bloc by expanding the bench from nine judges to as many as 15. His “court-packing” gambit failed, but the threat did help save the New Deal, by spooking some of the court’s most conservative justices into stepping down.

Supreme Power is more than a mere “blow by blow” account of the contretemps, said Jay Wexler in The Boston Globe. “Shesol is a terrific storyteller” who ushers readers into every hushed or smoke-filled room where the drama unfolded. Ultimately, the author accepts the consensus view that FDR’s scheme was doomed by hubris: The president sprung his proposal on Congress without warning, dishonestly packaging it as an effort to help the court’s septuagenarian justices keep up with their caseloads. Yet Shesol doesn’t think the proposal was as rash as many historians claim. FDR genuinely believed that he had come up with a completely constitutional means of ensuring, at a time of economic crisis, that the government wouldn’t fail the country because of a few old men in robes.

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Bill Clinton, for one, thinks FDR did the right thing, said Jonathan Alter in Newsweek. At a recent party for Shesol, Clinton said that if Obama wants to protect his health-reform programs against Supreme Court legal challenges, he should openly challenge the ideology of the current court majority. Dragging justices into a political battle, the logic goes, usually reduces their mystique. As in 1937, the nation today is engaged in a profound debate about the appropriate role of government in its citizens’ lives, said Casey Greenfield in TheDailyBeast.com. Shesol’s lively narrative gets to the heart of that debate better than any “dense treatise” ever could.