Comment by UncleMeat
4 days ago
Packing the court just means passing legislation. It isn't some criminal thing.
The court is an expression of political power. Expressing political power through it is not stupid.
4 days ago
Packing the court just means passing legislation. It isn't some criminal thing.
The court is an expression of political power. Expressing political power through it is not stupid.
Packing the court is unprecedented, and as soon as anyone did it, they would both do it continuously. It would also outrage the other party and make the first to do it more likely to lose the next election.
So you would get to pack the court for the rest of your current term before the other party gets back in and packs it the other way, and thereafter lose the courts as a check on the party in power forever because the first thing a party would do when they get into power is pack the courts.
It's a monumentally stupid idea.
As with partisan gerrymandering, packing the court cannot be the only step.
It would need to come with a commitment to a package of difficult to undo (i.e. amendments) reforms. SCOTUS term limits, preventing the Senate from refusing to even consider nominees, bans on justices receiving gifts (https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...), revocation of Presidential immunity, etc. You pack the court with an explicit promise to largely return to the old status quo when it's fixed.
The SC should be formed by lot from judges in the lower courts, every so often (every session might work OK).
We form other courts by lot. Constitutionally, there just must be a Supreme Court. It doesn’t say how it should be composed.
Packing is a band-aid, and likely to be unpopular. This is a fix with a less nakedly-partisan result, so should be easier to sell.
Do you really think that if you packed the court, there is anything you could do to prevent the other party from doing the same thing the next time they're in power? Your plan would have to be to prevent them from ever getting back into power, and that's a civil war.
On top of that, Clarence Thomas is the oldest person on the court and Alito is only two years younger. By the end of the next Presidential term they'll both be in their 80s. You don't have to pack the court, you just have to be in office for the term or two after this one.
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I see no reason we can't have hundreds of supreme court judges.