The Democrats' Supreme Court Hail Mary
( I'm pleased Biden will not answer the question on this issue. Don't reveal your hand now.)
This is the progressive case for court packing in a nutshell: “If your wallet is stolen, you don’t forgo efforts to recover it just because it might be stolen again.”
ELAINE GODFREY
5:00 AM ET
It was only a matter of time, really. Ever since Senate Republicans refused to hold a vote on Merrick Garland four years ago, progressives have argued that Democrats need to wrest back control of the Supreme Court by packing it full of liberal justices. By the Democratic primary last year, the idea had gone relatively mainstream, and half of the presidential candidates expressed openness to it. Now, in the five days since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, calls from the left to pack the court have reached a volume that will be difficult for party leaders to ignore. Democrats have few options to try to prevent President Donald Trump from confirming his nominee, whom he plans to announce on Saturday. So they’re already gaming out how to get revenge.
If Trump confirms a new justice this year, “when Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court,” Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts tweeted over the weekend. Democrats at various levels of seniority followed suit, including House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seemed receptive: “Nothing is off the table next year” if the GOP tries to fill Ginsburg’s seat, he said.
Aaron Belkin, a political-science professor at San Francisco State University and the executive director of the think tank the Palm Center, is grateful to see prominent Democrats finally coming around to the plan he’s spent the past year trying to advance. In 2019, Belkin co-founded the advocacy group Take Back the Court in response to Trump’s appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
The trouble for Belkin and other Democrats is their goal’s political feasibility—and not just because the party has to win the Senate and the White House first. Joe Biden has shown reluctance to eliminate the filibuster, which Democrats would need to do to pass a court-expansion law, and he is outright opposed to increasing the justices’ numbers, disinclined to take any radical action that would further exacerbate partisan tensions. “We need to de-escalate, not escalate,” he said during a speech in Philadelphia over the weekend. In a local-news interview last summer, he warned that Democrats would “rue” the day they packed the Court because Republicans would simply do the same the next time they were in power.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/democrats-case-court-packing/616446/
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