Georgia Democrat Senate candidate Raphael Warnock repeatedly refused to answer during a debate on Sunday night whether he supports packing the U.S. Supreme Court.
Supreme Court packing, which is something that the majority of Americans oppose, has gained steam among the left wing of the Democrat Party over the past couple of years since President Donald Trump was afforded the opportunity to appoint multiple Supreme Court justices. Warnock is running against Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), who repeatedly referred to him throughout the debate as “radical liberal Raphael Warnock.”
A moderator asked Warnock, “If Democrats do win control of the U.S. Senate, there will be pressure to increase the size of the U.S. Supreme Court. Would you support adding more justices to the Supreme Court to offset President Trump’s recent appointments?”
Warnock completely ignored the question, claiming, “I want to point out that Kelly Loeffler actually voted to defund the police.”
“And as I move all across the state … people aren’t asking me about the courts and whether we should expand the courts,” he later added. “I know that’s an interesting question for people inside the beltway to discuss.”
The moderator again asked Warnock to answer the question, and Warnock again refused to answer, saying, “I’m really not focused on it.”
WATCH:
This is one of the most ridiculous deflections I've seen in politics…
Democrat Raphael Warnock dodged multiple times when asked if he'd pack the U.S. Supreme Court. pic.twitter.com/gFkRuoNw6Q
— Nathan Brand (@NathanBrandWA) December 7, 2020
A report by Fox News described court packing as a “fringe idea” that was last attempted over 80 years ago by Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “who sought to force through parts of his New Deal that were ruled unconstitutional by the high court.” The Daily Wire reported:
Recent polling has found that the majority of Americans supported confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, with support for her confirmation increasing as the public saw more of her. Conversely, only 28 percent of the public opposed her confirmation and only 27 percent support Democrats’ extremist proposal of partisan court packing.
Some Democrats responded to the latest confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett by threatening to pack the courts.
In a statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) claimed that Barrett’s confirmation was a “usurped Supreme Court seat,” and claimed without evidence that President Donald Trump had manipulated the Supreme Court.
Court packing is so controversial that even some top Democrats oppose it, including Sen. Joe Manchin (WV), who recently told Fox News that he “will not vote to pack the courts.”
On the campaign trail, Democrat Joe Biden repeatedly refused to answer if he would support packing the Supreme Court, saying at one point that voters “don’t” deserve to know whether he supported that idea.
Biden later found a way of getting around having to answer whether he supported the idea, which was to announce that he would create a national commission tasked with evaluating court reform ideas.
“If elected, what I will do is I’ll put together a national commission of bipartisan commission of scholars, constitutional scholars, Democrats, Republicans, liberal, conservative,” Biden told CBS News. “And I will ask them to over 180 days come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system because it’s getting out of whack, the way in which it’s being handled. And it’s not about court packing. There’s a number of other things that our constitutional scholars have debated, and I’d look to see what recommendations that commission might make.”