Once concerns about Biden “packing” the SCOTUS began to circulate before the election, I wondered why Trump didn’t immediately pick up on that and do it himself.
Because the short term consequences don’t outweigh the horrific long term consequences.
Republican-appointed justices have a 6-3 advantage over Democratic-appointed justices. There wouldn’t be any point to Trump trying to “pack” the court.
Because Trump has never read the US Constitution, has never studied US history, and has the attention span of a dog turd when people near him are speaking and the conversation isn’t about him.
Do you seriously believe that this is what the worst and least intelligent president in history was thinking? Or was it because it was never necessary to do so in order to turn the balance to the right?
But perhaps you would be kind enough to explain to us what the “horrific long term consequences” are. Who has decreed that nine is the ideal number of justices for the highest court in the land, whose rulings are final? I would think that a larger number reduces the influence of any single justice who might be an ideological extremist or nutbar.
Because, like using nuclear weapons against a nuke-armed adversary, once you cross that threshold, there’s no going back.
Which makes it all the more perturbing that a sizable number of Democrats openly called for court-packing if Barrett was confirmed and Biden won. Even the Republicans were wise enough not to pack SCOTUS when they had the chance.
I never thought Trump had any original ideas on this topic but did whatever the Federalist Society recommended. Why didn’t the Federalist Society recommend that Trump add an additional 10 justices (from their list) to the SC?
The “court packing” envisioned by Democrats before the election involved a Democratic House and Senate passing legislation that would expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court. Obviously that fell apart due to the election results.
Trump never tried it for a couple reasons. Since 2019, Democrats have controlled the House so it been a nonstarter the last two years. And in 2017-18 Republicans had a two seat majority in the Senate, which probably would not have been enough too pass a court packing bill even if they killed the filibuster (which they would have to).
But more fundamentally, Trump DID pack the courts. Not just three Supreme Court justices in four years, but hundreds of lower court positions that had been held open by Republicans toward the end of the Obama Administration.
I’m not octopus, but once you pack the Court (in a way that consists of putting your own ideologues onto the bench, as opposed to say, half and half), you give your opponent every incentive to do the same down the road. You put 4 on the Court? I’ll put 10 when I get the chance next time. Or maybe even 50.
(Not “you” as in you personally, but in the concept in general)
Just like once you cross the threshold of not allowing the President to nominate Supreme Court justices, there’s no going back on that, either. Trump didn’t pack the court because he (and McConnel) took other measures, instead. To fix the extreme measures they took, court-packing is now our least-extreme option.
Because they didn’t want to cross the threshold. And also, when you add more justices in such a blatantly partisan way, you’re reducing the legitimacy of the Court and inviting defiance of SCOTUS rulings. The whole entity of the Supreme Court depends on people respecting and abiding by it, and blatant packing greatly reduces any such sentiment.
More like 5-3-1, and there are plenty of things this unpacked Court didn’t give Trump that he wanted. The Supreme Court, even with Barrett, didn’t even take up the Texas election lawsuit, for instance. Had Trump had a couple dozen lackeys on the bench, it might have been a different story.
But, again, what makes nine exactly the right number? If there’s some horrendous threshold that one crosses by having too many justices, why not go the other way and roll the number back to 5, for instance?
And I don’t think anyone has said that there should be a unilateral presidential authority to do this. Last I heard, Biden talked about having a non-partisan advisory body examine the issue and provide guidance.
It doesn’t have to necessarily be nine - indeed, there are people who have argued that now that we have 13 circuit courts, we ought to have 13 Supreme Court justices. If a president proposed increasing the current Supreme Court by adding two liberals and two conservatives, I think that might have bipartisan support in Congress. That wouldn’t give advantage to either side.
The problem is that almost every time someone suggests increasing the Court’s size, they mean doing so in totally partisan fashion - either adding more liberals, or more conservatives - but not a mixture. Whether left or right, they’re proposing it with the blatant intent of gaining advantage.
Is the intent to swing the court to a liberal majority? Or is it to create a more balanced, less ideologically-driven makeup? The answer to that question may address your complaint. Because right now the court is ideologically biased as all hell. They have already put religious nuttery ahead of public safety.
Wrong. You just don’t understand how badly that would backfire on either party that tried that.
Well, as @flurb pointed out, Trump would have needed friendly majorities in both houses of Congress. He certainly can’t pack the court by an Executive Order or anything like that. By the time Trump really needed to pack the court, Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t have let him, even if Mitch McConnell went along with it.
Yes but from January 2017 through November 2018, he did have red majorities in both houses.
I’m not sure that the GOP in that time period was quite at the point of letting Trump put a dozen lackeys on SCOTUS, though. From their point of view, conventional “packing” was going just fine–they’d already arguably gone “nuclear” with the whole Merrick Garland/Neil Gorsuch seat; no need to go thermonuclear on behalf of a guy that most of them really don’t even like that well.
Republicans couldn’t even repeal Obamacare — a huge Republican priority— while they ostensibly controlled both sides of the Capitol. Court packing would have been infinitely more controversial. And they didn’t need it.