Mulford v. Smith

Appellant
James H. Mulford
Appellee
Nat Smith
Appellant's Claim
That penalties under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 for overproduction are unconstitutional.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant
A. J. Little, L. E. Heath
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
Omer W. Franklin
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, Felix Frankfurter, Charles Evans Hughes, Stanley FormanReed, Owen Josephus Roberts (writing for the Court), Harlan Fiske Stone
Justices Dissenting
Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds (Louis D. Brandeis did not participate)
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
17 April 1939
Decision
The Supreme Court upheld the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938.
Significance
Justice Roberts, who had written the opinion striking down the first Agricultural Adjustment Act, United States v. Butler (1936), also wrote the opinion here. His change in attitude is a vivid illustration of the important role he played as a swing vote on the Court.
James H. Mulford was a tobacco producer who had been fined under the terms ofthe Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, a piece of legislation that was part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal agenda for combatting the GreatDepression. Under the terms of the act, the federal government set a production quota for each tobacco grower. If a grower exceeded this amount, the tobacco auction warehouseman--in this case, Nat Smith--was obliged to penalize thegrower. The purpose of this scheme was to prevent tobacco growers from "dumping" their product and disordering the market, thus adding to the economic chaos that held sway throughout the country.
Mulford sued in the District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, challenging the federal act. After the district court upheld the penalty levied against him, Mulford took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Justice Roberts Reverses Himself
Owen J. Roberts had often been a swing vote on the Court during the early years of the New Deal. From 1933 to 1937, the Court was dominated by justices who were holdovers from earlier, highly conservative Courts that believed, above all things, in the laissez faire approach to economic matters. Thatis, they believed that the federal government should not interfere in the marketplace. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, however, this became a dangerous attitude--at least in the eyes of Roosevelt and other New Dealers. For the first five years he was in office, Roosevelt found the Supreme Court opposed to nearly every major piece of legislation he proposed.
One of these rejected statutes was the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which the Court struck down by a vote of 6-3 in United States v. Butler, for which Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion. The next year, the standoff between Roosevelt and the Courts reached a climax when the president proposed a plan to "pack" the Court with justices who would pass his New deallegislation. In 1937--perhaps partly in response to this threat--Roberts softened his attitude towards the New Deal, and in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), he joined the 5-member majority to become the deciding vote upholding a state minimum wage law modeled on New Deal principles. Thus he performed what has come to be known as the "switch in time that saved nine"-- ninejustices, that is.
Thereafter, Roberts--and the Court--consistently voted to uphold major New Deal legislation. No more vivid illustration of his reorientation exists than Mulford, in which Roberts, again writing for the Court, now upheld thesecond Agricultural Adjustment Act as an appropriate exercise of Congress's commerce power:

Any rule, such as that embodied in the Act, which is intended to foster, protect, and conserve . . . commerce, or to prevent theflow of commerce from working harm to the people of the nation, is within the competence of Congress . . . The motive of Congress in exerting the power is irrelevant to the validity of the legislation . . . The provisions of the Act under review constitute a regulation of interstate and foreign commerce within the competency of Congress under the power delegated to it by the Constitution.

Roberts, and a majority of the members of the Hughes Court, now admitted thatthey were confronting an economic emergency that was national in scope and required national legislative remedies. Their weapon of choice in combatting the Depression would remain Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce.Holdouts remained on the Court--James C. McReynolds had the dubious distinction of never voting to uphold New Deal legislation--but Roberts was not amongthem.
Related Cases

• United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936).
  
• West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937).

Swing Vote
A swing vote refers to a minority interest or neutral segment of the voters that combines its voting power with that of other minority interests or that of majority interests, creating a controlling interest. The swing vote comes into play in the state and federal supreme courts when justices vote whether to uphold or strike down the rulings of lower courts. Justices considered swing voters often make the difference in close and controversial decisions. These justices sometimes hold views that fall in the middle of the political spectrum, that is, in between liberal and conservative or in between Democratic and Republican views. Since the U.S. Supreme Court includes nine justices andrulings are made based on majority votes, the swing voter makes the difference in 5-4 votes. Many legal scholars characterized Justice Byron R. White (1962-1993), for example, as a swing voter.
Sources
Lance Liebman "Swing Man on the Supreme Court." The New York Times, 8October 1972.