Posted on 09/21/2020 9:18:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
If Joe Biden wins the November election, Democrats will try to pack the Supreme Court—and that’s just for starters.
It didn’t take long after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death for the left to trot out arguments for packing the Supreme Court.
“If the Democrats are unable to block Trump’s nominee, there is but one choice should Joe Biden win the White House and the Democrats take back a majority in the Senate: pack the Supreme Court,” argued an article at The Nation. “If McConnell pushes through a nominee, President Biden should pack the court,” ran a headline at the Washington Post.
The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg went further, arguing not only that Democrats should pack the court if Republicans manage to fill Ginsburg’s now-vacant seat, but that if they even try, “Outraged people should take to the streets en masse” in an effort to grind the Senate to a halt through civic unrest.
It’s not just hysterical columnists who are calling for a court-packing scheme if Biden wins. House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler endorsed the idea in a tweet on Saturday, as did former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Joe Kennedy III, and a host of other Democratic elected officials. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer both alluded to it. (Pelosi is also refusing to rule out a second impeachment of Trump to delay Senate efforts to confirm a Supreme Court justice.)
This isn’t just empty rhetoric, they mean it. And packing the court with at least two additional seats—one for Ginsburg and one for Merrick Garland, whom Democrats feel is entitled to a seat simply because President Obama nominated him—is just the beginning of what Democrats will try to do if Biden wins the election. Schemes are now afoot to pack the court, abolish the Senate filibuster, and grant statehood to Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.
What all these moves have in common is that they would erode the constitutional mechanisms in place that Democrats see as impediments to their complete control over the levers of government power.
Expanding the number of states, for example, is a work-around for what they would like to do but can’t quite bring themselves to say outright: abolish states’ equal representation in the Senate. Why, they ask, should sparsely populated conservative states like South Dakota get as many votes in the Senate as California and New York? By adding what Democrats believe would be permanently blue states, they could cement their control over the Senate and stop worrying about what Americans in South Dakota or Wyoming think.
The same logic applies to getting rid of the Senate filibuster. Once Democrats are in control of the Senate, why should a minority of GOP senators be allowed to stop them from carrying out their designs? The common thread here, from court-packing to new states to ending the filibuster, is that Democrats believe they have an obligation, once they gain power, to ensure they never lose it again. If that means shredding the parts of the Constitution that have held them back in the past, then so be it.
That, in turn, means there’s more at stake in November than the electoral fortunes of one Donald J. Trump. The Constitution itself is on the ballot.
Do voters realize that? Every Republican running for office in November should make sure they do. GOP candidates, and above all Trump himself, should be at pains to point out that what we’ve seen previously from Democrats will seem like child’s play compared to what we’ll see if they win the White House and Senate.
To be clear, what they tried to do the last time they held these branches was pretty egregious. In 2014, every Democrat in the Democrat-controlled Senate voted effectively to abolish the First Amendment under the pretext of regulating campaign finance. The constitutional amendment that then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democrats supported would have given Congress and state legislatures the power to impose spending limits—which is to say, limits on speech—on unions, corporations, nonprofits, individuals, and even candidates who wanted to criticize elected officials in the run-up to an election.
It was also during Reid’s tenure as majority leader that Senate Democrats deployed what Washington called “the nuclear option,” changing Senate rules in 2013 to allow presidential nominees for all executive branch and judicial positions except the Supreme Court to advance with a simple majority of 51 votes. Democrats, frustrated with GOP filibusters of Obama nominations, decided the best response was to remove this impediment to the exercise of power.
They should have been more careful. Democrats’ abolishment of the filibuster is one reason the GOP-controlled Senate under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been able to confirm so many federal judges. As Reid admitted in The New York Times a few years back, “I doubt any of us envisioned Donald J. Trump’s becoming the first president to take office under the new rules.”
You would think Democrats had learned their lesson. What they thought was a permanent majority under Obama somehow didn’t hold together in 2016, and they have spent the last four years refusing to accept that reality. If they manage to gain power this time around, expect even more extreme measures to circumvent and erode constitutional protections against majoritarian rule. They might start by packing the Supreme Court, but they won’t end there.
When is it not?
The Constitution should not be on the ballot. What is being contested here must be utterly destroyed by force!
Adding new states is not unconstitutional, it has been done before.
Adding seats to the Supreme Court is not unconstitutional, it has been done before.
“You would think Democrats had learned their lesson.”
They are not chastened, because they know that they need to win just one more time, to seize power permanently, or at least until America resurrects after being driven into the ground.
RBG Has been given a pass for the damage she did to our United States Constitution and to our schools...a remarkable woman who tore, for decades, at the very fiber of our Republic.
Wait a minute. Who said it was?
Here’s an interesting question to play with....
If you were God deciding what to do next with America, would you want this next election to be about who is the better leader??? Or would you want it to be about Abortion?
Now... just to clarify, this question implies that God doesn’t know something, when clearly he does.... He knows everything past present future... It’s actually more about Us KNOWING where WE stand, so that when judgment comes we will have no excuse.
The article said “If that means shredding the parts of the Constitution that have held them back in the past, then so be it.”
If the Dems try to block his appointment and he wins the election and wins back the house, he should raise the number of Justices to 11.
FDR tried to pack the court but the Senate stopped him in 1937.
Or am I missing something?
.....would Carol Swain be good candidate for SCOTUS ??
“Adding new states is not unconstitutional, it has been done before.”
Contitution, Article 4, sec 3:
New states may be admitted by the Congress into this union; but no new states shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress.
So the allowing of any state to split is at the hands of both houses of congress. And with the obvious distancing of the houses, it may make it through the house, but probably not through the senate.
Adding seats to the Supreme Court is not unconstitutional, it has been done before.
The U.S. Constitution does not define the size of the Supreme Court. After the Judiciary Act of 1869, sometimes called the Circuit Judges Act of 1869, a United States statute, provided that the Supreme Court of the United States would consist of the chief justice of the United States and eight associate justices, no new seats were changed. Adding justices to the court has been attempted during the FDR effort to try to pack the court for rulings on his new deal. The C.J. Act of 1869 remains the accepted practice of the court size today. So yes it’s been done before, but the effort was slammed shut with a no go even by FDR’s vice president to change the C.J. Act.
rwood
They have pushed the idea the Constitution is a "living document" to turn the Constitution into an effective nullity.
They have primarily been successful in this endeavor by the appointment of Progressive justices through democratic practices, because the founders did not envision a mass media dominated by a philosophy antethical to the idea of limited government.
It is quite possible to use Constitutional means to destroy the Constitution, as intended.
Giving DC statehood is not creating a new state, it is abolishing the Seat of Government of the United States.
Article 1 Section 8
To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;
Congress would have to cede the power to make laws for the Seat of Government. This would require an amendment to the constitution.
It would probably be easier to give DC a senator and representative by amendment that to make it a state.
I’m guessing that if DC statehood goes forward it would not include the areas of federal infrastructure such as the White House and Capitol building. It would only include residential areas.
So is expelling them.
But, I would still say that making DC a state would take an amendment to the Constitution.
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