The Left's New Obsession: Packing the Supreme Court

Progressives willing to throw separation of powers and judicial independence overboard.

Grassroots leftists are planning an assault on the Supreme Court’s judicial independence. In addition to threatening impeachment proceedings against Justice Brett Kavanaugh if the Democrats take back control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections next month, some progressives are trotting out President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s discredited idea to pack the Supreme Court with progressive justices to counter the rightward direction of the Court. Even before President Trump nominated Justice Kavanaugh to replace retired Justice Kennedy on the Supreme Court, progressives were promoting this idea.

Fordham law professor Jed Shugerman, for example, tweeted: “A president under investigation for impeachment has never appointed a Justice. Not Nixon, not Clinton, not Andrew Johnson. Never. Democrats should make clear that if the GOP destroys this tradition, they will expand the Court to 15 in 2021 without filibuster.”

Harvard Law lecturer Ian Samuel tweeted: “Pack the courts as soon as we get the chance. ‘Pack the courts’ should be a phrase on par with ‘abolish ICE.’” He has described himself as “literally a card-carrying socialist.”

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, wrote a column in USA Today advocating a mega-Supreme Court consisting of 59 justices. “Let’s keep the nine we have who are appointed by the president, and add one from each state, to be appointed by governors, and then confirmed by the Senate,” he wrote. “If the Supreme Court is going to function, as it does, like a super-legislature, it might as well be legislature-sized.”

It is the progressives who want the Supreme Court to enact their leftwing policies as if it were another legislative chamber, rather than to interpret the Constitution and statutes as written. Indeed, a columnist for Jacobin, the self-described voice of the American left, was at least honest enough to reveal the true agenda underlying the progressive revival of the court-packing idea. He wrote: “We shouldn't let a handful of reactionary judges get in the way of progressive change. It's time to pack the Supreme Court.”

Read the rest from Joseph Klein HERE.

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