Dems Reintroduce Bill to Pack Supreme Court

Dems Reintroduce Bill to Pack Supreme Court
By Nancy Thorner

As reported in the Washington Examiner on May 22, 2023: “Supreme Court packing just the latest Democratic effort to control the court.”

The move to reintroduce the bill comes as financial disclosures for the Supreme Court justices, as well as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, are being scrutinized by Democrats who are unhappy with the court's conservative majority.

The current May 16, 2023 bill was originally introduced about 2 years ago by Markey and other Democrats, but it did not receive a vote in either chamber of Congress.

As for the bill, it would expand the Supreme Court from nine seats to 13 in what could only be a Democrat leftist effort to rig the Supreme Court to take over what is now considered to be a 6-3 conservative majority.

As for Court packing, it is against history and tradition and would likewise affect its legitimacy in the eyes of the public. The court has stood at nine members for 154 years and has exceeded that number only once during the emergency of the Civil War.

No truer statement could be made than the following: "Many Democratic leaders just won’t give up their nefarious court packing schemes. They also keep repeating flagrant falsehoods to support the idea."

Senator Markey's reasoning behind court packing

Following is Markey's explanation for the latest court packing bill: “When a bully steals your lunch money in the schoolyard, you have to do something about it or else the bully will come back over and over again. So we’re in this fight, and we’re going to reclaim these seats. We’re not going to allow the bully to win.”

As the Washington Examiner article very effectively points out with numerous factual examples:

“For four decades, the Left has abused the process, with Republicans being the victims.”

“By the middle of President Ronald Reagan’s first term, the Left was using the American Bar Association to scuttle judicial nominees on spurious ideological grounds. By 1986, leftists earned their first major scalp by blocking the judicial nomination of Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, leveling accusations of “racism” against him despite the public record strongly indicating the opposite.”

Also noted: “Not a single Democratic Supreme Court nomination in more than half a century has been in doubt, and no Democratic nominees to appellate courts have been subjected to personal character assassinations the way Republican nominees have, making the bullying being all on Markey's side.”

Clarence Thomas faulted for receiving lavish gifts from Republican megadonor

Although all the court's conservatives are under attack, most of the left's rancor has been directed at Justice Clarence Thomas, thought to be the court's most reliable conservative, as well as its longest-serving member at more than 31 years. Several Democrats have even demanded that Thomas resign from the bench.

On Monday, May 8, 2023, Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and the other Democrats on the committee, issued a letter to Harlan Crow requesting that he provide an itemized list of gifts worth more than $415 that he gave to Thomas or any other justices or their family members. They also asked Crow to provide a full list of real estate transactions, transportation, lodging and admission to private clubs he might have provided. This move comes as Democrats are escalating their calls for ethics reforms at the court.

As to the charges, Thomas said that he had been advised that the trips and gifts were “personal hospitality from close personal friends and did not have to be reported in disclosures."

On the sale of properties, Crow said in a statement that "he had purchased Thomas’ mother's house to preserve it for a possible future museum showing where the justice grew up."

Cruz comes to defense of Thomas

A DailyWire.com article, “Cruz Shreds Democrats’ Smear Campaign Against Justice Clarence Thomas”, details Cruz's slamming of Democrats for their attempts to smear conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Cruz is reported as saying that they (Democrats) “were engaged in the same despicable tactics that then Sen. Joe Biden used back in the early 90s to smear Thomas."

As to the before mentioned Tuesday's May 8, 2023, Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Linsey Graham noted the many trips that liberal justices have taken that were paid for by others'

Graham also pointed out that Kagan, the former dean of Harvard Law School, did not step aside from a case pending at the court challenging Harvard's consideration of race in admissions.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., weighed in by pointing out that the American Civil Liberties Union had once paid for Sotomayor to visit Puerto Rico when she was in her previous role as an appeals court judge — which required her to disclose it at the time.

While Chief Justice Roberts declined to attend the Judiciary Committee hearing, he did suggest in a letter that "packing the court would threaten the independence of the judiciary."

All justices also expressed their commitment to ethics principles in a signed statement, a statement that was heavily criticized by ethics experts who said it did little to address recent concerns.

Conclusions

At a time when public confidence in institutions is already at a low point, adding justices to the Supreme Court would only make it worse.

Even though the following article is dated 6/28/22, U.S. Supreme Court Roe v Wade Abortion Rights Poll, and the poll referred to was conducted shortly after the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, a majority (54%) of Americans were opposed to the expansion of the Supreme Court. .

In a 6/30/22 article by Joe Concha, “Biden was right: Expanding the Supreme Court is a boneheaded idea”, Biden reportedly said as a senator in 1983: “It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make.”

Before she died, liberal appointee Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made this strong statements against court expansion. “I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court,” she told NPR. “If anything would make the court look partisan, it would be that — one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’”

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, also described as a liberal, likewise spoke against court packing. In a speech at the Harvard Law School he said public trust is necessary to establish the court's authority. As the Washington Post reported Breyer as saying: “This was a trust that the court is guided by legal principle, not politics.

Democrats claim the move would restore balance to the court after former President Donald Trump appointed three of the nine current justices, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, but what about the sense of independence when justices often rule in ways opposite to what the presidents who nominated them might have hoped?

As for Republicans, they see adding justices to the Supreme Court an attempt for Democrats to weaponize the court.

The bill's prospect: Since Republicans now control the House and Democrats don't hold enough of a majority in the Senate, it's not likely that the bill will be moved to a vote in either the House or the Senate; however, this will not prevent Democrats from attempting again to weaponize the Supreme Court as they pursue complete power and control of our nation.