The Folly of Court-Packing Proposals | City Journal
Last week, eight House Democrats held a press conference on the Capitol steps to call for adding four Supreme Court justices. The goal, of course, is to allow President Biden to overturn the Court s nascent 6 3 conservative majority.
This renewed push for court-packing which can be defined neutrally as expanding the Court for political reasons comes after a term that produced ruling after ruling that angered progressive politicians and activists. Weeks after schoolchildren were massacred in Texas, they took away protections against gun violence, said Sara Lipton, executive director of Take Back the Court Action Fund during Monday s press conference. During the hottest summer on record, they made it harder for the EPA to combat climate change. And in a year where state houses across the country pushed hateful anti-trans legislation, the court eviscerated the boundary between church and state, opening the door to discrimination and violence.
To his credit, President Joe Biden hasn t yet endorsed such a radical proposal. During the 2020 presidential campaign, he allowed that the Court was out of whack, but rejected court-packing even as his primary opponents embraced various kinds of reform.
Perhaps Biden recognizes that moves to enlarge the Court have a mixed record, to say the least. Even setting aside Franklin Delano Roosevelt s disastrous Judicial Procedures Reform Bill, court-packing has a dubious pedigree. Though the Constitution doesn t specify the number of justices, each historical expansion was accompanied by political mischief.
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