"Oyez!" if you didn't know, is Latin for "Hear ye!" The word is still used to open sessions of the U.S. Supreme Court and lesser courts throughout the land.

It's an appropriate starting place to talk about President Bush's address last night nominating John G. Roberts to the Supreme Court.

The President's address was notably brief, and notably bland, although Mr. Bush permitted himself a swipe at judicial activism when he said that his nominee would "strictly apply the Constitution and laws not legislate from the bench."

Conservatives today are unhappy with judges who "legislate from the bench." And yet there was a time in our history when liberals had the same complaint.

In the mid-1930s, the great majority of Americans believed that the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt offered us the best way out of the Great Depression. But during those years, the Supreme Court was declaring large chunks of the New Deal unconstitutional. Public feeling against the Court ran high. The justices were derided as "nine old men" standing in the way of progress.

So President Roosevelt went on national radio and delivered one of his famous "fireside chats." In this address, he proposed to appoint one new Supreme Court justice for every member of the Court over the age of seventy. That would fix the "nine old men."

I recently looked up the text of that fireside chat. It is a gem of speech – reasonable, moderate in tone and very persuasive. President Roosevelt pointed out that there was nothing sacred about having nine Supreme Court justices. The Constitution does not specify the number of justices, and the number, in fact, fluctuated throughout our history until custom fixed it at nine. Furthermore, the President went to great lengths to reassure people that his plan was, as he put it, "no attack on the Court." Rather, he said, "it seeks to restore the Court to its rightful and historic place in our system of constitutional government."

Yet for all his popularity, all his political acumen, and all his skills as a great communicator -- and for all the unpopularity of the court at the time – FDR failed to persuade the public to support his proposal. Instinctively, the people recognized that if the President got his way, the independence of our judicial branch of government would be compromised.

There's a lesson there for President Bush. In the presidential election of 1936, Franklin Roosevelt had carried 46 of what were then the 48 states of the union. But still he failed in his proposal to add new justices to the Supreme Court. Even today, we remember this episode as FDR's "court-packing scheme" – and it ranks one of the greatest setbacks ever dealt a popular president. Where Supreme Court nominations are concerned, people are less likely to be swayed by what the President says, than by their own gut feelings as to whether or not the Supreme Court is being stacked one way or another.