Desperate to keep a conservative majority from ruling the Supreme Court, leftists have proposed court-packing as a means to tip the scales. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says that would be a bad idea.
Speaking with NPR, Ginsburg denounced past attempts to pack the Supreme Court, such as when President Franklin Roosevelt attempted to do so in the 1930s.
“Nine seems to be a good number,” the justice said. “It’s been that way for a long time. I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Court.”
As noted by LifeNews, another liberal on the court, Justice Breyer, agrees that court-packing would be problematic as well. America largely agrees with both Ginsburg and Breyer, with a recent Rasmussen poll indicating that Americans would rather see term limits on the Supreme Court before they see court-packing.
“A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that only 27% of Likely U.S. Voters favor increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court. Fifty-one percent (51%) are opposed, but 22% are undecided,” the pollster reported at the time.
Despite court-packing being wildly unpopular, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) still proposed a version of it at the Democratic Presidential debate several weeks ago. “I do not believe in packing the court,” he said. “We’ve got a terrible 5-4 majority conservative court right now. But I do believe constitutionally we have the power to rotate judges to other courts and that brings in new blood into the Supreme Court and a majority I hope that will understand that a woman has a right to control her own body and that corporations cannot run the United States of America.”
Shortly before her election to U.S. Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) openly stated that Democrats should pack the Supreme Court. “I think that we take back the House, we take back the Senate, we take back the presidency, and we pack the Supreme Court of the United States of America,” she said.
If Democrats should actually pull a stunt like that, Charles Cooke of National Review predicts Democrats would suffer massive political fallout, resulting in a landslide for Republicans in the midterms, nullifying whatever liberal majority the Democrats stack on the court.
“For a start, the move would be extraordinary unpopular — lest anyone wonder, it would cause a constitutional crisis — and the backlash would be both swift and considerable,” wrote Cooke. “Even in times of prosperity, it is tough for either party to keep full control of the government, and, given the geographical distributions within our politics at the moment, it is especially hard for the Democratic party to do so. To so much as try a court-packing scheme would be to invite every Republican voter in the country to line up at the voting booth, along with a good chunk of independents in their endless search for ‘balance,’ and to permanently irritate the very ‘conservative’ justices whose influence the plan was supposed to destroy. “