I like reading articles from the view of the Left. I have decided to read one to you concerning court packing from Vox.com.
Enjoy!
The Situation
Last week, on Friday, Joe Biden signed an Executive Order that will give a 36-person commission to analyze the benefits and pitfalls of adding justices to the Supreme Court. This commission is going to be bipartisan and will be made up of legal scholars.
So far, court packing has not been a real popular idea except for the radical left. Biden opposed it a few years ago. So did Barrack Obama. But that was a time when liberal justices had an advantage in the courts. But there were also liberal justices that thought the idea was bad including Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer. Many liberal and leftist news outlets believe trying to pack the court is a fool’s errand and point to FDR trying to pack the court in 1937.
But Biden and his leftist advisors know that a lot of his far left, radical policies are going to get challenged, especially when trying to reintroduce Obamacare and gun control. They also have this illogical fear of Roe versus Wade being overturned.
Let’s look at a Vox article that takes the leftist position on court packing and the its apparent destiny.
The Story
This is an article called “Biden’s New Supreme Court Commission Won’t Fix Anything” by Ian Millhiser. You can tell from the title of the article that there is a definite bias as to what he thinks of court packing. In case you don’t know, Vox is a far left publication and use it to get the skinny on what they think about certain political and cultural issues.
Here we go:
In 2014, Judge Thomas Griffith authored an opinion in Halbig v. Burwell that could have wrecked Obamacare’s insurance markets in over 30 states and potentially stripped health coverage from millions of Americans. Griffith’s court eventually vacated his ruling against Obamacare, and the Supreme Court rejected Griffith’s reasoning in King v. Burwell (2015) — but not before the Halbig decision plunged the Obama administration, health care advocates, and patients into a year of terror that Obamacare would be gutted.
I do want to point out that Obamacare was seen as unconstitutional by that court because of the mandate. That is a fine that one has to pay if one doesn’t have healthcare and the fines were used to help pay for Obamacare. This is unconstitutional because the federal government can’t force someone to buy something and fine them if he doesn’t.
Chief Justice Roberts, who is hardly a conservative, decided to call the “fine” a “tax” which made it constitutional. Obama called it a fine so I’m not sure what the hell Roberts was thinking.
On Friday, President Joe Biden announced that he would sign an executive order creating a “Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.” Griffith — who retired from the federal bench in 2020, allowing former President Trump to choose his successor — is one of several prominent conservatives on this commission, which the White House says Biden appointed to “provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform.”
Yet, while the author of one of the most significant attacks on Obamacare in the last decade is on Biden’s commission, none of the leading academic proponents of Supreme Court reform were appointed (the overwhelming majority of the commission’s three dozen members are law professors or political scientists).
If this is true, this is the first unifying thing that Biden has actually done. Not sure how true it is.
Biden initially said in October he would convene a commission of leading academics to study possible reforms to the Supreme Court. At the time, Biden was torn between liberal activists who were enraged by Senate Republicans’ efforts to ensure that the GOP could control the Supreme Court, and Republican critics who accused Democrats of wanting to add seats to the Supreme Court in order to undo those efforts by the GOP.
This annoys me. The Supreme Court is not suppose to be partisan. It’s suppose to read the Constitution and make a determination based on the words of the Constitution. Period. The Supreme Court doesn’t “undo” anything. It determines if something is legal or not.
Rather than take a position on whether to add seats to the Supreme Court, Biden ultimately punted the question until after the election with his promise to appoint a commission.
Now he has appointed such a commission and, measured solely by its intellectual firepower, the names on the commission are impressive. They include some of the nations’ most prominent legal academics, such as Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe.
But the commission does not include law professors Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman, authors of a highly influential proposal to expand the Supreme Court to 15 justices and have the key members of the Court be chosen in a bipartisan process that is intended to make the Court less ideological. And it does not include Aaron Belkin, a political science professor and leader of Take Back the Court, a pro-reform organization. In choosing the members of this commission, the White House appears to have prioritized bipartisanship and star power within the legal academy over choosing people who have actually spent a meaningful amount of time advocating for Supreme Court reforms.
This is a lie. Epps and Sitaraman believed that upping the number of justices was necessary because, “without radical reforms to save its legitimacy, the Court may never recover from its transformation into a nakedly partisan institution.” In other words, they see textualists as radical and activist justices as non-partisan.
They also believed that it is the Senate that should determine who the justices are, not the President. By the way, that unconstitutional and, might I say, quite radical.
The writer fails to bring this up as to why they are not on the panel.
When the White House released the list of commission members on Friday, it swiftly won praise — from members of the conservative Federalist Society. Evan Bernick, a right-libertarian law professor at Georgetown, praised the commission as a “powerhouse lineup of scholars.” Stephen Sachs, a Duke Law professor who won the Federalist Society’s Joseph Story Award in 2020, called the commission “an astonishingly well-balanced list.”
Ilya Somin, a libertarian law professor at George Mason University, wrote shortly after the commission’s membership was announced that “the composition of the Commission is also bad news for advocates of court-packing, who may have hoped that it will produce a report endorsing the idea.”
So, if the White House’s goal was to allay concerns among conservatives that President Biden might try to diminish the Republican Party’s influence over the judiciary, this commission appears to have accomplished that goal.
He doesn’t ask the simple question here: Is true bipartisanship with Biden’s condition a good thing? Especially since Joe Biden as done nothing that could be bipartisan so far since becoming President. There’s a reason he doesn’t ask that.
How We Got to this Point
Not that long ago, the idea of adding additional seats to the Supreme Court in order to change its partisan makeup was considered very radical. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed doing so in 1937 in order to neutralize a Court that frequently struck down New Deal programs on spurious legal grounds, but his proposal was unpopular and ultimately went nowhere.
The New Deal was a socialist program. It violated the Constitution. That’s why it was struck down. Just look at the National Recovery Administration (NRA) of 1933 that was struck down in 1935, unanimously, by the Supreme Court.
Yet several crucial events happened in recent years that convinced many Democrats that the federal judiciary is unfairly stacked against them. In 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February of that year, Senate Republicans refused to even give a confirmation hearing to President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, now-Attorney General Merrick Garland.
At the time, Republicans claimed that it was inappropriate to confirm a Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.
But then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September of 2020, and Republicans immediately abandoned the position that they invented in order to justify scuttling Garland’s nomination. Trump’s nominee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was confirmed just eight days before the 2020 election, which threw Trump out of office.
In the interim between Garland’s unsuccessful nomination and Barrett’s successful one, Democrats endured two other significant traumas. The first was that Trump became president, despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Republicans also controlled the Senate for the entirety of Trump’s presidency — but they only controlled the Senate thanks to malapportionment. The Democratic “minority” in the Senate represented millions more Americans than the Republican “majority” during Trump’s presidency.
We’ve talked about this before.
- Because the court may not be liberal does not mean it’s unfairly stacked.
- What Mitch McConnell did was not only not “unfair” it has been done dozens of times before in the past.
- Traumas? They lost the Presidency and they controlled the Senate. Don’t elections “have consequences”?
- And the Senate mat “represent” less citizens but the Senate is suppose to represent states not citizens. Why should California have more representatives in the Senate than Wyoming? That’s what the House of Representatives are for.
- This shows me that this guy knows nothing of the ideas of the Democratic Republic that the Founding Fathers envisioned.
- How does this guy become a writer.
Indeed, all three of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the country.
The second trauma was the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was credibly accused of attempting to rape Dr. Christine Blasey Ford while Kavanaugh and Ford were both in high school. Kavanaugh responded to these allegations with an angry rant before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he seemed to threaten retaliation against Democrats for repeating the allegations against him — “what goes around comes around,” Kavanaugh told the committee.
- News flash: Brett Kavanaugh was not credibly accused.
- Why was Kavanaugh defending himself considered a rant. He was pissed and deserved to be so.
- Kavanaugh’s statement wasn’t a threat, it was a warning.
- I hate when people misrepresent lies as fact. It makes their evaluations null. Wait until we talk about Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to be an Antiracist. His introduction lost me interest because his theory was based off lies.
All of this contributed to a sense among Democrats that the Court has become too partisan, and led many prominent Democrats to conclude that radical action was necessary to prevent a GOP-led Supreme Court from dismantling voting rights and otherwise entrenching Republican power.
Again, the court became to partisan because three justices selected were textualists and not liberal activists.
Yet, when candidate Biden was asked about whether he’d support radical reforms such as adding seats to the Supreme Court, he initially said he opposed these reforms. After Ginsburg’s death, he took a more agnostic stance, saying that, while he’s “not been a fan of court-packing,” his approach to the issue would depend on how the Barrett confirmation fight played out.
Now that Barrett’s been confirmed, however, Biden appears to be signaling with his new commission that significant reforms to the Supreme Court will not be on the table.
Biden doesn’t want to pack the Supreme Court but he is conflicted. His policies may not get through Supreme Court criticisms with a textualists court.
Why a Milquetoast Supreme Court Matters
Court-packing is not something that anyone should do lightly. If Democrats did add seats to the Supreme Court in order to change its partisan balance, the result most likely would not be widespread acceptance of the newly liberal Court’s decisions. It would be massive resistance from Republicans.
Or the cases would be decided by partisan activists and the court was manipulated to become another legislative branch. I think if the Republicans did it, there would be riots everywhere. Look at the fit thrown by Dems when Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett were nominated.
As Justice Stephen Breyer recently warned during a lecture at Harvard Law School, “structural alteration [of the Court] motivated by the perception of political influence” will erode trust in the Court’s decisions.
And now the left wants Breyer to retire or resign.
Yet, while Breyer is correct to warn that significant reforms to the Supreme Court are likely to undermine the Court’s legitimacy, the mere threat of court-packing can serve an important function. If the justices believe that President Biden may send them six new colleagues if the Court dismantles what remains of the Voting Rights Act, then those justices may be less likely to dismantle the Voting Rights Act.
Wait a minute. Is he saying Biden is trying to threaten the court by talking about packing the courts? If he manipulated the courts based on a threat, wouldn’t that make the Supreme Court partisan?
A healthy fear of a Democratic majority could lead the Supreme Court to become less partisan.
Threatening to make the court partisan will make it less partisan? Isn’t it less partisan now? Or is partiality not the issue here? Could it be that, to the left, it is partisan when there are more textualists on the court that might not go for the left’s unconstitutional laws?
But Biden’s new commission sends the opposite message. With so many prominent members of the Federalist Society praising the commission right out the gate, it’s clear that conservatives do not feel threatened by this commission. And the justices themselves are just as capable of looking at the list of names that Biden picked and seeing that this commission is unlikely to support significant reforms.
Conclusion
I don’t think packing the Supreme Court is going to happen. Here’s why:
- Joe Biden is luke warm on the subject. He didn’t believe in it before and I’m not sure he does now.
- If Biden did select a non-partisan committee, there’s a good chance reasonable minds will prevail.
- Four to five months is a long time to debate this. By the time the conference is done and the report is written, we will be at the start of the 2022 election cycle. Unlike Biden, Democrats on the election trail are going to have to explain this.
- Joe Biden might have a moment of clarity from his dementia and realize how dangerous and stupid it is.
- I think the leftist Democrats are beginning to take some heat and realizing their stuff ain’t that popular. The border issue, the spending, the tax increases, the global corporate tax thing, the love of other countries, the changes to military policy, the ignoring of China, the continued lockdowns with COVID waning, the trans thing, the equity thing, the race thing, the voting reform and the heavy gun control restrictions. These are not popular with most of the country.
The Supreme Court should not be expanded because:
- It makes the Supreme Court partisan.
- It makes the Supreme Court another legislative body.
- Any decision will be questioned.
- It will never end. Imagine a Supreme Court with 400 justices.
https://www.vox.com/2021/4/10/22375792/supreme-court-biden-commission-reform-court-packing-federalist-society
