Word: nra
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Amid all these great projects, however, the case of A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. vs. U.S. was working its way through the legal system. The four Schechter brothers, who ran a small kosher poultry business in Brooklyn, had been convicted of several violations of the NRA code, including the sale of diseased poultry. "If I'd known how much this appeal was going to cost," Joseph Schechter later complained of his $60,000 legal fees, "I probably would have gone to jail." But it was this tawdry case that inspired Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, stroking his white beard...
...Supreme Court opinion, delivered in May of 1935, was unanimous-and withering. In voting for the NRA, said Hughes, Congress had delegated "virtually unfettered" powers to the Administration, and that was "utterly inconsistent with the constitutional prerogatives and duties of Congress." The NRA case was the most important of the dozens challenging New Deal legislation that had been filed in the courts, but more trouble lay ahead. The following January, by a vote of 6 to 3, the court struck down the whole AAA program to regulate agriculture. The fact that Congress felt there was "a situation of national concern...
...President and the Congress could be thwarted by nine old men-one of the Justices was 80, five were in their 70s, none was under 60-inspired Roosevelt to begin planning retribution. Before that, however, he had to repair some of the damage. The labor safeguards in the NRA re-emerged in the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935, and Congress passed a new version of the AAA as the Soil Conservation...
...better. While the major recovery programs like the NRA and AAA have faded into history, many of Roosevelt's reforms-Social Security, stock market regulation, minimum wage, insured bank deposits-are now taken for granted...
...NRA badly needed a human whirlwind like Johnson. Roosevelt described the act, when he signed it in June, as "the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress," but it was actually an ill-considered amalgam of two conflicting and somewhat unrealistic strategies. To revive production, which had dropped by almost 50% since 1929, the NRA invited all employers within a given industry to ignore the antitrust laws and draw up their own "codes of fair competition." That implicitly permitted not only production curbs but legalized price fixing. On the other hand, to stop the rapid...