The Democrats' Long-Term Strategy to Pack the Supreme Court
Article publisher:
National Review
Article date:
17 January 2022
Article category:
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body:
... “What do Democrats really want most?”
... They want the virtually unlimited power that control of all three branches of government would give them. The next time elections give them control of the White House and a workable majority control of Congress, they will also want control of the U.S. Supreme Court.
With control of the Court, they could adopt measures that the current majority of the Court would probably consider unconstitutional. Those would include:
* Reversing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and imposing strict controls on independent speech in political campaigns....
* Appointing activists to an expanded Federal Election Commission, the Justice Department, or another federal agency that would dictate the rules for voting and vote counting in the states.
* Guaranteeing constitutional success for their strategy of sidelining the Electoral College and disempowering voters in all but the biggest states, through the “National Popular Vote” compact.
* Rewriting labor law to disadvantage independent workers in the gig economy and those who work for small business, to force them to join the unions that fund Democratic campaigns....
* Restoring the ability of teachers’ unions to collect dues from nonmembers and excluding schools run by religious groups from eligibility for school-choice funding by states, thereby stifling efforts to expand parental choice in education....
There is one thing that these proposals have in common. They rely on progressive constitutional theories that a majority of the current Supreme Court might not support. That’s another way of saying that much of the modern agenda of the Left is simply unconstitutional, which is why the Left would like to change the composition of the Court, to include justices who give short shrift to the Constitution.
But the current majority of the Court does not appear likely to change dramatically for a generation. To gain control of it, Democrats would have to “pack the Court” by increasing the number of justices, as President Franklin Roosevelt tried but failed to do in 1937.
But to pack the Court, Democrats must first get rid of or weaken the Senate filibuster....
If Biden’s allies on the commission were serious about ensuring that Court-packing never threatens the independence of the Supreme Court, they would have paid more attention to a Supreme Court reform proposal now being considered — the proposed “Keep Nine” amendment to the U.S. Constitution, now backed by more than 200 members of Congress...
It simply says, “The Supreme Court of the United States shall be composed of nine Justices.”...