“Nothing can disguise the naked sword that has been drawn” is the way in which the Brooklyn Eagle reacted to President Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court. We had gone back to the files on Roosevelt’s court-packing plan after reading of Senator Leahy’s own scheme, introduced last week, to pack the Supreme Court with retired justices to fill in when one of the Nine recuses himself — or, to mark the point that seems to worry Mr. Leahy, herself. It seems that what is bothering the senator from Vermont is that Justice Kagan has so far recused herself from something like 25 cases, owing to the fact that she was solicitor general and, as a matter of course, involved in a lot of cases.

If FDR’s court-packing scheme was a “naked sword,” Leahy’s shiv is a mere switchblade, but dangerous nonetheless. NPR’s famous Supreme Court reporter, Nina Totenburg, was told that Mr. Leahy is blaming his idea on Justice Stevens. The senator suggests that it was Mr. Stevens who first came up with the idea, and Mr. Leahy has merely introduced the bill. He contends it would ensure that a “full court” hears all cases. The idea is to prevent tie votes. These days, however, the pool of retired Supreme Court justices available to fill in includes but Justices Souter, Stevens, and O’Connor. In other words, it is stacked two-to-one in favor of liberals, a point that is being marked in an editorial this morning in the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal warns, moreover, that an “appearance of horse-trading” would be created by Mr. Leahy’s scheme, because the justices themselves would pick which justice to haul out of retirement to fill in the bench from which one of their number had stepped aside. “While the plan is supposed to encourage recusals,” the Journal added, “we think it’s more likely it would limit recusals by Justices who doubt a fair result would be reached in their absence.” It strikes us as a shrewd observation, one calculated to alarm the liberals who have been calling for recusals every time a conservative justice seems to have even the slightest conflict. The most famous recent instance when the liberals wanted Justice Scalia to step aside was a case involving Vice President Cheney, with whom Mr. Scalia had once shared a duck-blind.

It can be no coincidence that Mr. Leahy is advancing court packing plan as the president grows ever more strident in his attacks on the Supreme Court. The Court the has driven Mr. Obama nigh to distraction by ruling that a church group called Citizen’s United — and by extension the rest of our companies and labor unions — can spend money during campaign season to criticize candidates. No doubt the president and Mr. Leahy fear for the president’s most radical programs that are under attack in the courts. All the right people laughed at the idea that the courts would entertain questioning of Obamacare on constitutional grounds; but so far, two courts have indicated precisely such questions must go to trial.

FDR also feared for his programs. He also wrapped his politics in all sorts of high-minded rhetoric. His court packing scheme would have allowed him to add an additional justice to the Supreme Court for every justice over 70 years old. “We must find a way,” Roosevelt said in his fireside chat of March 9, 1937, “to take an appeal from the Supreme Court to the Constitution itself.” He insisted his plan was “no attack on the Court” but merely sought have the court “resume its high task of building anew on the Constitution ‘a system of living law.’” The controversy raged in the public prints for nearly a year, but by the end of 1937, it was fading in the Senate, where his court-packing plan finally died a death that is little-mourned. One can expect that will be the fate of Mr. Leahy’s plan unless the guardians of honest and constitutional government fail to watch their backs.