Ditto your comment, but minus the “perhaps”.
bttt
Back in the Nixon days when it was being debated about citizens owning gold again, there were articles about the government seizing gold from citizens when it went off the gold standard during the Roosevelt regime.
One that sticks in my mind was two brothers, who exercized their right to redeem $20,000 in paper money for gold, then at $21 the ounce. Evidently sensing what was coming, they did this a few months before the edict. After the law went into effect, the Feds tracked those guys down and confiscated the gold, giving them $20,000 in paper.
The brothers sued, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled against them, saying that no harm was done since they got their $20,000 back, conveniently forgetting that gold was now valued at $35 the ounce. That’s whe it became obvious to me that the SC bent to whichever way the political wind was blowing at the time.
An interesting sidebar is that foreign governments could still redeem in gold until the LBJ days when they started a run on Fort Knox. LBJ and Co. talked them into redeeming the equivalent in Silver Certificates and then ran a campaign lambasting the public for hoarding the rapidly disappearing silver coins.
A further government windfall is “seniorage”. That’s the difference in what it cost the government to mint the coin and what the face value is. For instance, today it costs the government 10c to produce a 25c piece, with the difference going into the Treasury as “profit”.
Roosevelt had heard through Supreme Court back channels that he was going to lose these cases in a 5-to-4 decision with Hughes on the majority side. Roosevelt sent word to the Federal Marshals Service to expect an order from the president not to enforce a Supreme Court decision. Roosevelt made sure that word got to Hughes that the order was on the way.
This would have been an impeacable offense. But who would impeach Roosevelt? His party totally controlled Congress, and the people viewed FDR as their savior. In a constitutional crisis created by that order, Roosevelt would be in a position to destroy the Supreme Court as an institution.
Like Roosevelt, Hughes had once been a governor of New York, and he could count noses as well as the president. He knew that the only way he could save the Court would be to knuckle under to Roosevelt's demands, and that's what he did. In doing so, he unintenionally created the Living Constitution, the document that changes like a chameleon to match its surroundings.
From tiny acorns do mighty oaks grow.
The more I learn about FDR, the less I think of him.