As many conservatives feared and predicted, President Joe Biden is inching his way toward packing the Supreme Court, a radical and dangerous policy that even revered liberal legal minds have rejected.
Biden signed an executive order on Friday creating a 36-person bipartisan commission that will review the Supreme Court’s history and investigate potential changes to the nomination process and potential consequences of altering the court’s size. As my colleague Quin Hillyer notes, the commission will not issue specific recommendations, but its report will nevertheless be used by leftists to justify “reforms” to the judiciary that will include adding seats to the high court’s bench.
If this is the policy Biden pursues, he will be defying the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s wishes. Just a few years ago, Ginsburg warned leftists against packing the court, saying that it “would make the court appear partisan” and destroy the public’s confidence in the court’s credibility, and therefore the court itself.
“It would be one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges so we’ll have more people who will vote the way we want them to,’” she explained.
Justice Stephen Breyer, another one of the high court’s liberal titans, echoed Ginsburg’s concerns earlier this month. The court’s authority depends on “a trust that the court is guided by legal principle, not politics,” Breyer explained.
“Structural alteration motivated by the perception of political influence can only feed that latter perception, further eroding that trust,” he added, noting that liberals ought to “think long and hard” about what they’re trying to do.
Biden was also once an opponent of court-packing, calling former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to add seats to the bench a “bonehead idea” and a “terrible, terrible mistake.” He accused Roosevelt of being “corrupted by power” and praised congressional Democrats for standing up to his attempted “executive overreach.”
“It put in question there for an entire decade the independence of the most significant body in this country,” Biden said in 1983.
Perhaps Biden forgot about his 1983 speech — he seems to be doing a lot of that lately — or maybe he just changed his mind. (He’s been doing a lot of that, too.) Regardless, Biden ought to listen to the legal experts who understand the court better than anyone, and much better than the leftist activists who would turn the Supreme Court into a political hammer if he lets them.
