Senate Judiciary member Sen. Chris Coons said that Pres Trump’s USSC nominee Amy Coney Barrett “constitutes court-packing....
One of the dumbest statements ever spoken by a US Senator.
REALITY CHECK: The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, frequently called the “court-packing plan,”
was proposed by then-Pres FDR to add more justices to the USSC .
FDR wanted to coerce favorable rulings regarding New Deal legislation that the USSC had ruled unconstitutional.
The central provision of the FDR bill would have granted the president power to appoint an additional justice to the USSC,
to a maximum of six, for every member of the court over the age of 70 years and 6 months.
BACKSTORY In the Judiciary Act of 1869, Congress had established that the USSC would consist of the chief justice and eight associate justices.
Who happens to be a man that looked way too happy when a touchy-feely, corrupt old colleague now running for the big seat got in his young daughter's space.
To modern Democrats, there is apparently nothing wrong with letting one's little girl take one for the team, and Coons is a good modern Democrat.
What is lost in the retelling is that FDR lost the battle but won the war. Although he lost the 'court-packing' scheme, the Supreme Court, previously stout in resisting the multiple 'New Deal' expansions of the power of the Executive Branch, started to be much more accommodating to the encroachment.
Five years after this, the Supreme Court, having lost Chief Justice Hughes to retirement, ruled in FDR's Administration's favor in the case of Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), where a farmer (Filburn) was fined for growing too much wheat FOR HIS OWN USE. With 8 of the 9 Justices now appointed by FDR, the Supreme Court grossly expanded the power implied to the US Constitution's "Commerce Clause" and rendered the concept of private property!
But Senator Harris said “court packing” is putting 50 white people on the court and not one black person. Another super stupid Senator.