Start United States USA — Art The Abiding Shame of 'Packing' the Supreme Court| Opinion

The Abiding Shame of 'Packing' the Supreme Court| Opinion

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As shameful as the present stunt is, it is at least clarifying about the modern Democratic Party’s thirst for power.
In 2005, then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) delivered a Senate floor speech about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s doomed 1937 plan to „pack“ the U.S. Supreme Court. FDR’s plan would have permitted him to add six justices, immediately securing a pro-New Deal judicial majority. But „in an act of great courage, Roosevelt’s own party stood up against this institutional power grab,“ Biden recounted 16 years ago. „They did not agree with the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, but they believed that Roosevelt was wrong to seek to defy established traditions as a way of stopping that activism.“ In fact, Biden actually understated the extent to which Senate Democrats rebuked the iconic Democratic president’s court-packing scheme. The Senate Judiciary Committee report issued at the time used eye-opening, clarion language: „Let us of the Seventy-fifth Congress, in words that will never be disregarded by any succeeding Congress, declare that we would rather have an independent Court, a fearless Court, a Court that will dare to announce its honest opinions in what it believes to be the defense of the liberties of the people, than a Court that, out of fear or sense of obligation to the appointing power, or factional passion, approves any measure we may enact. We are not the judges of the judges. We are not above the Constitution.“ (Indeed, public policy aside, the constitutionality of partisan court-packing is questionable, as professor Mike Rappaport of the University of San Diego argued in November.) Roosevelt’s plan was soundly defeated on the floor of the Democrat-dominated Senate, and no president or political party since has had the temerity to resuscitate the ghost of court-packing. The Supreme Court has thus sat comfortably at nine members—eight associate justices and one chief justice—since the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1869.

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