Dems Latest Scheme: ‘Balance’ Supreme Court by Adding Two Liberal Judges
NEW YORK — Following the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh, some Democrats and progressive activists are shifting tactics, pushing a scheme to “pack” or “balance” the Supreme Court by adding two new seats to be filled by liberal judges. The Supreme Court expansion plot would be enacted if Democrats retake Congress and the presidency in 2020, according to the plan.
On Saturday, Vice’s West Coast editor Harry Cheadle referenced the plot in a piece titled, “We’re Watching the Slow Poisoning of the Supreme Court.”
He wrote:
Chatter of impeaching Kavanaugh was floating around, and some have taken to imagining a scenario where the Democrats retake Congress and the White House in 2020 but have their progressive legislation blocked by the Supreme Court. The only way forward then, the argument goes, would be appointing extra justices to “pack” the court—a scheme proposed by Franklin Roosevelt in response to a similarly right-wing Supreme Court in the 30s (FDR’s plan was rejected by Congress, but the court became friendlier to his policies anyway).
On Sunday, Vox.com featured an interview with political scientist David Faris, who advocated in a recently published book for Democrats to pack the Supreme Court with as many liberal judges as they can. Farris branded the plan the “neutron option for the Supreme Court.”
Cheadle himself previously summarized Faris’s arguments thusly:
[It] would involve first proposing a constitutional amendment to end lifetime tenure on the court and pushing a proposal to let each president pick two justices per term, a compromise that Faris hopes would “end the court wars.” He suspects Republicans wouldn’t go for that, however, so he’d advise the next Democratic president to just “pack” the court as FDR tried to do in 1937 before Congress rose up against him and prevented it. That would involve passing a bill to expand the size of the court and allowing the president to appoint however many justices would be needed to create a new liberal majority, with the friendly Senate signing off on any appointee. (This would be legal, Faris points out, because there’s nothing in the Constitution stipulating the size of the court, which has in fact fluctuated in the past.)
Indiana Law professor and podcaster Ian Samuel, meanwhile, advocated for such a plan to become a new progressive catch phrase, tweeting, “‘Pack the courts’ should be a phrase on par with ‘abolish ICE.'”
Huffington Post senior reporter Zach Carter followed with a piece titled, “Hey, Democrats: Pack The Court.” “‘Eleven Justices’ is the next ‘Abolish ICE,’” was the subtitled of the article.
Writing at NBC.com on Sunday, political science professor Scott Lemieux opined that “Democrats are now much more likely to mobilize against an even more conservative court.”
https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/10/07/dems-latest-scheme-balance-supreme-court-by-adding-two-liberal-judges/
DEM PLAYBOOK
1. ATTACK OPPOSITION = FAIL (attempt anarchy)
2. ATTACK INDIVIDUAL = FAIL (attempt anarchy)
3. ATTACK SYSTEM = ??