Las Vegas Review Journal, December 15, 2021
President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court commission, which released its final report last week, offered no recommendations about expanding the number of justices. But that hasn’t stopped progressives from continuing to embrace court packing as a means of advancing their radical agenda.
In a sense, the panel’s decision to punt on the more controversial reforms is an apt reflection of its birth. Recall that the commission came about after Mr. Biden bobbed and weaved for weeks last year on the campaign trail to avoid answering whether, if elected, he’d support expanding the high court to 13 or 15 justices. His promise to create a panel to examine the issue dulled media inquisitiveness.
Some Democrats, however, aren’t willing to let the president off so easily. This week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., penned an op-ed for the Boston Globe calling into question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and embracing the addition of justices “as a necessary step to restore” the court’s “credibility.” She called the court “lawless.”
Sen. Warren’s partisan passions have blinded her to the irony of her ill-considered rhetoric. For five years, Sen. Warren and other Democrats have insisted that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the republic, a man who would dismantle long-standing institutions that promote and protect American democracy. Yet here she is openly impugning the integrity of the highest court in the land while threatening the justices with retaliation if their rulings don’t adhere to her misguided collectivist sensibilities.
Nor is this the first time that Sen. Warren has been overtly hostile to constitutional norms. She is an ardent supporter of a congressional proposal to rewrite the First Amendment to give federal functionaries the power to regulate political speech.
Mr. Biden’s commission was overwhelmingly comprised of left-leaning experts and academics, and many of them were queasy about embracing a court-packing scheme that would rightly be viewed as a power grab more characteristic of a tinhorn dictatorship (see: Venezuela) than the United States. In fact, Sen. Warren’s proposal would be a destabilizing and divisive act and have nothing to do with advancing democracy and everything to do with undermining checks and balances for ideological ends.
Court packing would “significantly undermine the Supreme Court’s independence,” notes a passage in the commission’s report on the cons of adding justices. “Courts cannot serve as effective checks on government officials if their personnel can be altered by those same government officials.”
During the 2020 campaign,
Mr. Biden recognized the political risks of endorsing court packing. If he now caves to progressives and heeds Sen. Warren’s siren call, he’ll be making a bigger mess of the 2022 midterms than he already has.