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certain relief to the President that it was over. At least, I read that in his features and expression that day.
While I was still there Cummings began to damn the Supreme Court. He said, “Mr. President, what can you expect? This decision of the Supreme Court is absolutely unnecessary. They could just as well have decided in the other way. This is in line with their old-fashioned, their archaic, their reactionary decisions in the old Hammer v. Dagenhart case and in all the other cases that we have taken up. This is all that you can expect of the Supreme Court. We've got old McReynolds on the court.” McReynolds was a personally disagreeable follow. He made a kind of a fetish of being disagreeable. “We've got that old man, Van Devanter, who's dead from the neck up, who never was a good lawyer. There he is growing older and older.” Butler and Sutherland were also on the court and very old. Roberts and Hughes were intelligent, but wrong-headed, or so Cummings would have called them. But he would have called the others something out of the Middle Ages. He was muttering about, “Hughes is no better than they are. He ought to know better, but he's following along. He's a better lawyer, but he follows along. They've got themselves stuck in these things. The total effect is complete reactionaryism.”
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