Category: court-packing

House Democrats Push Bill to Pack Supreme Court With Four More Justices

Posted on by Rusty Weiss

House Democrats are making an official effort to pack four additional associate justices onto the Supreme Court, expanding the total number from 9 to 13.

Such a move would presumably give a liberal tilt to the court by a 7-6 margin.

Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA), who sponsored the bill originally introduced in April of 2021, held a press conference with several other Democrat co-sponsors on Monday.

Johnson channeled President Biden’s messaging by describing the Supreme Court as “ultra right-wing” and claiming it is “at crisis with itself and with our democracy.”

Or, in English, he means “The Court didn’t do what we wanted.”

The Georgia lawmaker, who once famously asked during a House Armed Services Committee hearing if the island of Guam might capsize if too many people were on it, added that “basic freedoms are under assault” due to the current makeup of the Supreme Court.

RELATED: Democrats To Explore Impeachment Options For Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas

Democrats Desperate to Pack the Supreme Court

Other House Democrats at the press conference pushing for legislation to pack the Supreme Court included Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ), Andy Levin (MI), Rashida Tlaib (MI), Mondaire Jones (NY), Sheila Jackson Lee (TX), Mark Takano (CA), and Jan Schakowsky (IL).

Tlaib unleashed, calling the six conservative justices “unelected” (because the other three must have been elected) and claiming they are “literally telling women they have no control over their bodies.” (They are not literally saying any such thing.)

Tlaib has denounced pro-lifers at rallies held outside the Supreme Court before, once telling those who don’t approve of abortion they “shouldn’t even want to have sex with me.”

Jones, one of the original co-sponsors of the bill, tried his hand at a Jedi mind trick, claiming the GOP had actually packed the Supreme Court as he touted the bill designed to actually pack the Supreme Court.

“The nightmare scenario of GOP court-packing is already upon us,” he told reporters. “That’s how they got this far-right 6-3 majority in the first place.”

Jones’ main beef appears to be an inability to get gun control legislation passed, something he referenced last month when threatening to do everything Democrats could to force it through.

“If the filibuster obstructs us, we will abolish it. If the Supreme Court objects, we will expand it,” Jones seethed. “And we will not rest until we have taken weapons of war out of circulation and our communities each and every day.”

RELATED: Dem Rep Jones Threatens To Abolish Filibuster, Pack The Supreme Court If Republicans Refuse To Cave On Gun Control

It Doesn’t Stop There

Currently, Johnson’s bill to pack the Supreme Court has 58 co-sponsors in the House but would likely die in the Senate where it would need 60 votes to overcome the filibuster.

Johnson made his case for urgency.

“We don’t have a generation to wait to reform the court,” he warned.

Johnson and his House colleagues have made it clear they will look at every opportunity to tilt the Supreme Court back in their favor.

Aside from simply packing the court with four justices which would magically give liberals a 7-6 advantage, Johnson, the chairman of the House Judiciary courts subcommittee, held a meeting that “discusses Congress’s impeachment authority” as a means to regulate “the conduct of Supreme Court justices.”

The aim of that meeting was to discuss the possibility of impeaching Clarence Thomas, the most conservative Justice currently serving on the Supreme Court.

A recent poll shows overwhelming opposition to packing the Supreme Court – 65% of respondents in a recent poll were opposed to the idea and only 26% were in favor.

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Any Institution The Left Doesn’t Control They Seek To Destroy

Posted on by The Daily Signal

By Jarrett Stepman for The Daily Signal

From overturning Roe v. Wade to supporting the Second Amendment and maintaining religious liberty, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have put the left in a sour mood.

The left certainly hasn’t taken the news well.

Despite the left’s obsession with the notion that the right is all about “undermining democracy,” the left has shown little trepidation in demanding we lay waste to republican institutions that stand in opposition to its agenda.

Pleas for “court packing” from Democrats have been building for a while. Undoubtedly, those calls will become louder now, despite caution from the Biden administration. The latter hasn’t stopped plenty of prominent Democrats from acceding to the calls of activists to “burn it down”—figuratively and perhaps even literally. 

They’ve both demanded court-packing with liberal justices and called into question the Supreme Court’s legitimacy.

RELATED: Justice Alito’s Opinion Doesn’t Just Overturn Roe v. Wade, It Shreds It to Pieces

It’s become a full-blown tantrum from people used to getting their way.

“This court has lost legitimacy. They have burned whatever legitimacy they may still have had after their gun decision, after their voting decision, after their union decision,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on ABC’s “This Week.”

“They just took the last of it and set a torch to it,” Warren said. “I believe we need to get some confidence back in our court, and that means we need more justices on the United States Supreme Court.”

Following the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., marched with protesters in front of the Supreme Court and joined in chants of “illegitimate.”

She later said that “impeachment” was on the table for Supreme Court justices, who she insinuated had lied under oath at their Senate confirmation hearings. As Tim Carney wrote in the Washington Examiner, the idea that Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch promised to uphold Roe v. Wade is completely false.

Not to be outdone, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., went off the deep end in front of the Supreme Court. “Women are going to control their bodies, no matter how they try and stop us,” Waters said. “The hell with the Supreme Court. We will defy them.”

It appears that, for the left, liberalism is the standard by which something has “legitimacy.” Any institution they don’t immediately control they seek to destroy.

RELATED: AOC Wants ‘Consequences’ For Supreme Court Justices, Impeachment For Clarence Thomas

Part of this might be fueled by their typically overwhelming institutional control, which until very recently included the Supreme Court. For half a century, the court had delivered wins for the left on numerous policy and cultural issues, even when those issues weren’t popular—or in the case of Roe v. Wade and other decisions, weren’t based on particularly sound legal reasoning.

The court could be relied upon to be the left’s sort of deus ex machina, as liberal Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith admitted.

Now, there’s certainly a case to be made that the American political system has become too reliant on courts, rather than on the democratic process, to resolve divisive legal and moral issues. That was one of the problems with Roe v. Wade. By effectively declaring that having an abortion is a “right,” the issue was taken off the table for Americans.

That issue is now going back to the American people and their local elected officials. And that’s really where it should be decided. 

Again, it’s really something to hear the left rage against unelected judges “imposing” their ideas on the country. That’s effectively what Roe v. Wade did, except without supportive language in the Constitution, like the clear text of the Second Amendment, which the justices relied on in their ruling against a New York gun law the day before they overturned Roe. 

When conservatives faced significant legal setbacks in past decades, they didn’t attempt to blow up the court or pack it with additional justices to get their way. Instead, the right worked hard to build a serious institutional and legal infrastructure in opposition, with the Federalist Society being perhaps the most noteworthy example.

With the election of President Donald Trump—who appointed three Supreme Court justices—that generational work came to fruition.

The right worked within the system to create serious and lasting change. Liberals of this generation, it seems, failed the marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification.

RELATED: Progressives Want ‘Term Limits’ For Supreme Court Justices

The left certainly didn’t learn anything from then-Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. The then-Senate majority leader used the “nuclear option” to end the Republicans’ Senate filibuster of judicial nominations in 2013, which cleared the way for Trump and Senate Republicans later getting three justices on the Supreme Court.

Oops.

It’s perhaps a lesson for conservatives today.

 If we really want to overcome the great “awokening,” we need to consider long-term plans to recapture institutions or build new ones in opposition. It’s not enough to just attack them. Short-term victory without a longer-term strategy can easily backfire.

Syndicated with permission from The Daily Signal.

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