I agree that we need to start being more specific and all-encompassing in our legislative efforts, and stop passing the buck to the SCOTUS. But so-called “court packing” would also be a completely constitutional remedy, as would adding states to the union to do something about the extremely gerrymandered rural skew of the Senate. (People talk about DC and PR, and those are a good start; but what about Guam, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands?)
I do want to call out some “fuzzy math” I see on both sides of the aisle these past few days. (Yes, I’m engaging in “bothsidesism”, sue me.)
Ted Cruz has been making the rounds arguing that “the American people spoke” by voting to expand the GOP’s Senate majority in 2018. This, in his telling, means there was a popular mandate for “constitutional judges” (meaning right wing ones). But here are the facts: in 2016 Republicans got 40 million votes for their Senate candidates, while Democrats got 51 million. In 2018, when they “expanded their majority” (and they did actually do that, mind you: I’m just quoting Cruz, not using “scare quotes”), GOP Senate candidates got 34.7 million votes and Democrats received 52.2 million! All of which underlines the absolute necessity for us to add some more states, both to enfranchise millions of U.S. citizens in the Senate and to counterbalance the absurdly rightward skew we get from having Wyoming, Alaska, and the Dakotas combine for eight percent of the Senate despite making up less than one percent of the U.S. population, while California has twelve percent of the population but only two percent of the Senate.
However, I see some dubious claims coming from Democrats as well. One is the oft-mentioned idea that the GOP will claim control of the Court “for a generation”. How long is a generation? When I hear that, I think 25-30 years. But both Thomas and Alito are in their seventies, and Roberts is 65. Replacing two of those three makes for a liberal majority again, and that shouldn’t take “a generation” even if we don’t pack the Court (which we should).
Then there’s Chuck Schumer, who said yesterday that “If Leader McConnell presses forward, the Republican majority will have stolen two Supreme Court seats four years apart”. That makes no sense whatever. If they do this, you can argue either that the 2016 seat was stolen, or that this one is being stolen. You can even argue that neither of them is a theft. But how can you argue that both of them are? It’s fundamentally contradictory. (No more contradictory, of course, than Lindsay Graham has been from 2018 to now.)
