The Patriot Post® · Dems Once Again Wail About Packing the Court
Here we go again.
It’s early July, the Supreme Court’s term has just ended, and those on the Left are licking their wounds from another string of judicial defeats and demanding that Joe Biden do something — DO SOMETHING! — about our nation’s “illegitimate” High Court.
“The Congressional Progressive Caucus,” reports Fox News, “redoubled its efforts to impose term limits and confirm new justices to outweigh the current 6-3 conservative majority. Democrats have also pushed claims that the current court is illegitimate, an argument Biden himself contributed toward after the end of affirmative action last month.”
For clarification, the Supreme Court isn’t 6-3 in favor of the conservatives. It’s 5-3-1. No serious watcher of the Court believes Chief Justice John Roberts is a reliably conservative vote. Still, five justices make a majority. And, more often than not, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett have delivered on their promise to interpret the Constitution as it was written rather than as the proclivities of certain progressives might wish it to be written.
And this drives the Left nuts. It matters not that the Supreme Court’s three big decisions from last week — its rejection of Biden’s student debt cancellation plan, its rejection of racial discrimination in college admissions, and its support of free speech and religious freedom in business interactions — enjoy majority support among the American people. As far as the Left is concerned, the Court’s current composition can’t stand.
Take Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example. “The courts,” she said, “if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and, frankly, dangerous authoritarian expansion of power in the Supreme Court.”
We’re not sure what AOC is talking about here. The “balance of power” she says is missing is in fact right there in plain view: the legislative branch writes the laws; the executive branch enforces the laws; and the judicial branch interprets the constitutionality of the laws.
As for the “undemocratic” nature of the federal bench, that’s by design. Judges are supposed to be apolitical, and their rulings aren’t supposed to be swayed by political considerations. (Clearly, this isn’t always the case. But it ought to be.)
As for “dangerous” authoritarianism, what could be more so than the Democrats’ repeated attacks on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and their childish calls for packing the Court with likeminded leftists, all because that Court doesn’t rubber-stamp their policies and their legislation?
Surely Senate Democrats are better behaved and more measured than AOC and her House colleagues, right? Wrong. Here’s Connecticut Democrat Senator Chris Murphy, who couldn’t handle the Supreme Court’s ruling last week on behalf of a Christian woman, a Colorado-based web designer, whose conscience wouldn’t allow her to make websites for same-sex weddings. “The Supreme Court is now just a 9 person legislature,” Murphy said, “slinging takes and making law with cases that are basically made up by friendly right wing groups in order to get the new law they want from their 6 buddies on the court.”
Normally, we’d say such remarks are beneath a U.S. senator. But these days, nothing seems to be beneath an elected Democrat. Murphy is no doubt clueless to the fact that more than 47% of the Supreme Court’s cases were unanimously decided this term, as opposed to only 28% during the prior term. Further, as National Review’s Christian Schneider points out, “Liberals actually found themselves in the majority in 64 percent of cases.”
Nonetheless, the Left is on the court-packing warpath. “We must pass Reps. Jerry Nadler, Hank Johnson, and Mondaire Jones’ Judiciary Act to add justices and expand the Supreme Court,” said Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, who also called for passage of the trio’s Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act “to institute a Supreme Court ethics and recusal standard and require disclosure of lobbying and dark money interests.”
Fat chance of either of these abominations being taken up by a Republican-controlled House. Hey, elections have consequences.
And what of Joe Biden? What’s his position on court packing? Recall that in 2020, candidate Biden disgracefully refused to share his position on court packing with the American people, saying, “You’ll know my position on court packing the day after the election.”
Not exactly a profile in courage.
Last week, though, Biden actually came out against court packing, saying, “I think if we start the process of trying to expand the Court, we’re going to politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy.”
This is refreshing, but like most statements from this president, it has a freshness date. If the Angry Left continues its vile attacks on the Supreme Court, all bets for normalcy and decency are off.