Franklin Roosevelt appears in these episodes chiefly as a reference point for the institutional and legal changes associated with the New Deal, rather than as the subject of a dedicated discussion. Guests and the host invoke him when tracing the origins of securities regulation, judicial deference, the modern welfare state, and the 1937 effort to enlarge the Supreme Court.
The New Deal and securities regulation
In a discussion of the legal history of Rule 10b-5, Don Boudreaux notes that during the 1930s debates over the Securities Act and the Securities Exchange Act, there were proposals to make insider trading illegal, but that even the highly interventionist Congress under Franklin Roosevelt did not do so. What that Congress produced instead, in Boudreaux’s account, was a clause in the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Clause 10b, directed against securities fraud. Boudreaux stresses the distinction the host draws between fraud and insider trading, and describes how William Cary — a Columbia law professor whom John Kennedy appointed to head the Securities and Exchange Commission — later advanced the theory that Section 10b could be interpreted as a prohibition on insider trading. On this account, insider trading was not illegal in the United States until about 1961, and Congress never said it was illegal; the prohibition came from a bureaucrat at the SEC creating a new product Legalize Insider Trading (2009).
Roosevelt thus figures in that episode as the head of a Congress and administration that stopped short of the measure later attributed to the agency his successor’s appointee would lead.
Judicial deference and the progressive roots of the New Deal
Damon Root, discussing the libertarian legal movement, describes the original progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century as wanting the courts to play a very small role in questions of the government’s role in the economy, believing the burden of proof to declare an economic regulation unconstitutional was so high it could almost never be met. Root identifies Felix Frankfurter as a progressive activist, law professor, and advisor to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, whom Roosevelt then appointed to the Supreme Court, and says Frankfurter believed the elected branches should be given a wide degree of latitude by the courts Overruling Government Overreach: Damon Root on the Libertarian Legal Movement (2014).
The host’s framing in that exchange ties judicial deference to a system of top-down control in which a small number of officials at the top decide for the rest, and names Felix Frankfurter and Oliver Wendell Holmes as buying into that system. Root’s reply places Frankfurter’s jurisprudence in the context of Roosevelt’s New Deal and his appointment to the Court.
The welfare state and the progressive tradition
David Boaz, asked about how libertarians approach help for the less fortunate and the entitlement system, notes that advocates of big government from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton were called liberals in the understanding he grew up with, and distinguishes them from the original progressives of the early 20th century. Boaz says those original progressives wanted to help the poor partly by producing fewer of them, favoring eugenics and passing laws to forcibly sterilize women judged mentally incompetent David Boaz on The Libertarian Mind (2015).
In the same exchange the host raises Oliver Wendell Holmes’s opinion in a sterilization case, quoting Holmes’s phrase about three generations of imbeciles, and Boaz agrees Holmes was a leading progressive and that this was a progressive view at the time. Boaz adds that he does not think any progressives today hold such views. Roosevelt is named here as the starting point of a lineage of big-government advocates, not as an advocate of eugenics himself.
The 1937 court-packing effort
Josh Blackman, discussing the history of court packing, notes that the Constitution says nothing about how many justices there should be, that the number has ranged from as few as five to as many as ten during a brief period in the Civil War, and that for at least the last 150 years the court has settled on nine. He describes a movement in 1937 to expand or pack the court: President Franklin Roosevelt, frustrated that a conservative Supreme Court was ruling against progressive laws at both the state and federal level, proposed adding a justice for any justice over the age of 70. Blackman says everyone saw through the proposal as cynical and purely ideological, that FDR got burned, that his own party bucked him and even Democrats opposed it, and that the effort thankfully failed. He adds that Roosevelt would appoint five more justices in a couple of years anyway, giving him a majority on the court Eight-Dimensional Chess (2020).
The host extends the frame backward to 1801, describing John Adams’s lame-duck appointments to the federal judiciary as qualifying court packing, and Blackman agrees, describing the election of 1800, Adams’s lame-duck appointments to the lower courts and the Supreme Court, and the confirmation of John Marshall shortly before Jefferson took office. The host’s point is that court packing has a long history and that at least one founder saw nothing especially unconstitutional in the technique.
Across episodes
Roosevelt is invoked in four episodes spanning 2009 to 2020, and the treatment is consistent rather than developing: in each case he marks the origin or emblem of an expanded federal role — the 1930s securities statutes, the New Deal’s influence on judicial deference, the lineage of big-government advocates, and the 1937 court-packing attempt. No guest in these excerpts defends or reassesses him; the closest thing to a shift is Amity Shlaes’s remark that JFK was not a Franklin Roosevelt child in the way LBJ was, which places Roosevelt as a benchmark for a later president rather than revisiting Roosevelt himself Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019).
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not discuss Roosevelt’s early life, his governorship, his elections, his foreign policy, or the details of the New Deal programs beyond the securities statutes and the court-packing plan. They do not state the outcome of the 1937 proposal beyond its failure, nor the names of the justices Roosevelt appointed. No excerpt addresses Roosevelt’s death, his wartime leadership, or the constitutional debates over the scope of the commerce power that his administration provoked.