President Franklin Roosevelt tried it and failed – even with overwhelming majorities in Congress. That was because there were still a lot of Democrats opposed to authoritarian power grabs. Apparently, the Party moderates that were once known as “blue dog Democrats” are now politically “dead dogs.”
Back in the days when President Biden could honestly claim to be a moderate Democrat – willing to work across the aisle – he thought packing the court was a hairbrained idea. That is not the same Biden sitting in the Oval Office today.
There has not been any serious conversation about diddling around with the number of federal judges – including the justices on the Supreme Court – until now. So, why is the idea of adding more judges to the federal judiciary gaining gravitas currently?
The answer is simple. The political left in America assumes that they are anointed by some political theory to be natural rulers. Left-wing big-government policies are determined to be the only beneficial and correct policies. Alternative thinking is alleged to be ignorant, heartless or evil.
If you apply that standard to the federal courts – and especially the Supreme Court – activist liberalism is deemed to be the proper philosophy. Everything else is an aberration to be rejected at all costs.
For decades, the federal courts have leaned to the left – including the Supreme Court. With an unprecedent three appointments in his first term – more than any first-term President since George Washington – President Trump has been able to appoint three justices with a more conservative and restrictive view of the Constitution. In addition, Trump was able to appoint hundreds of jurists to the lower federal courts.
In the spirit that elections only have consequences if they win, the left-wing political culture – that has gained hegemony of the Democratic Party and the east coast elitist media – believes that they are justified to restructure the entire national court system to bring it back to the liberal version of normal.
Throughout the campaign, the voices on the radical left were promising to pack the court with hardcore left-wing judges should Democrats win the White House and the Senate. Many thought the idea much too radical to ever gain footing in a moderate Joe Biden presidency.
The first mistake was believing that Biden was a moderate.
Those who argued that Biden was a willing vessel for the left were correct. The most extreme policies advocated by the radical left have now become part and parcel of the Biden agenda.
The most obvious departure from moderation is Biden’s appointment of a commission to “study” the composition of the federal courts. Make no mistake about it, this will not be a balanced and objective review of the federal courts. It will be the vehicle to develop and popularize the need to expand the number of federal judges across the nation – and to propose an increase in the number of justices on the Supreme Court.
One does not need to have a crystal ball to know what will be in the commission’s report. The workload is too massive to be handled by the current judges. The ONLY solution will be to create more districts and more judges in all the districts. They will propose splitting the Ninth Federal District into two – with twice as many judges that currently serve in the Ninth.
Of course, they will see an absolute need to add more justices to the Supreme Court. The preferred number would be six – creating a 15-member Court. This would create the most philosophically lopsided Supreme Court since FDR tipped the balance with his eight appointments – and not all of them were from the radical left.
The Democrats do not want to bring the high court into any measure of balance. They wanted to shift it to the left for generations to come – arguably, forever. You can rest assured that those six new justices to be appointed by Biden would be from the far corner of the political left – and young enough to serve for more than a generation.
It is said that the commission will look at the possibility of a forced retirement age. You can bet that will not happen. With the prospect of tilting the Court to the extreme left, Democrats will not cut short the tenure of their new appointees.
Even as the court packing scheme is moving forward, there is pressure from the left on Justice Stephen Breyer to retire. He is the oldest member of the Court – but well enough to live more than four years. That would put his replacement in the uncertainty of the next presidency.
They saw what happened when liberal icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died in the last months of the Trump administration. They do not want to take a chance that a Republican President would replace Breyer.
Despite all the talk about balance, the left would be more than happy to see all the justices on the Supreme Court having the most radical activist temperaments. The current ruling-class of Democrat liberals do not see a loyal opposition, but rather enemies to be vanquished.
So, there ‘tis.
