It’s difficult to make substantive arguments against the Democrats’ Supreme Court “reform” proposal, since everyone knows it’s just a cynical ploy to delegitimize both the court and the Constitution.
Ask yourself this: Would any Democrat support the president’s court-packing scheme if they believed Republicans would win both Houses and the presidency? Of course not. It’s Calvinball all the way down.
And it is a court-packing scheme. An unconstitutional one. One imagines the term “court-packing” hasn’t polled very well with the public, so President Joe Biden – or whoever’s running the White House these days – signed off on a backdoor plan. An 18-year term limit for justices would, very conveniently, turn a 6-3 originalist majority into a 6-3 “living and breathing document” majority that would overturn many recent decisions, and rubber stamp a slew of federal abuses.
One might argue it’s all just an election gimmick, since the chances of the reform package passing are close to nil. That’s not the point. The Left has normalized the notion that the Supreme Court is both illegitimate and corrupt if it fails to bend to the will of partisans.
After all, none of the Left’s objections are grounded in anything resembling a legal argument. The entire case is centered around the specious idea that the court is failing because it does not adhere to the political vision of Democrats. They don’t even pretend to care about neutrality in law, much less the law itself. The contemporary leftist is a consequentialist with no limiting principles.
Speaking of authoritarians, Vice President Kamala Harris contends that packing the Supreme Court is necessary because “there is a clear crisis of confidence facing the Supreme Court.” Is there?
First off, we find ourselves here because of decades-long attacks on the institution. Wealthy progressive activist groups began cooking up pretend scandals and laundering them through faux journalistic operations.
The media can now affix the phrase “plagued by ethic scandals,” or some such nonsense, to every mention of the court. If there is any crisis of confidence, it’s because the Left concocted one.
Even still, Gallup finds that 30% of Americans have a “great deal/quite a lot” of confidence in the Supreme Court. The number has risen slightly in the past two years. Another 31% say they have “some” confidence in SCOTUS.
So, let’s set aside that pesky Article 3 of the Constitution for a moment. If polling is the excuse for stripping the independence of a branch of government, why would we allow Congress, with its 9% confidence rating, to do it?
Justices already enforce a code of judicial conduct. There is zero evidence any of them have engaged in unethical behavior on the bench that personally benefited a third party, much less themselves. And there is no evidence justices have deviated from their long-held legal philosophies because they vacationed with a rich friend or any other reason.
It’s also worth remembering that Democrats invented a bunch of new standards to smear Clarence Thomas that they would never follow themselves. Most judicial committee members leading the charge to delegitimize the court have traded in on their position to enrich themselves, including Dick Durbin, Richard Blumenthal, Sheldon Whitehouse and Peter Welch.
Come to think of it, maybe SCOTUS should be writing ethics rules for Congress.
Democrats want to institute their ethics code to create a system that allows partisans – armed with the newest garbage churned out by media – to slander justices in another congressional show trial and bogus investigations.
Sorry, the Supreme Court is an equal branch of government. Chuck Schumer is free to threaten justices, but they still don’t answer to him.
“What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach,” Biden says.
The president, whose family became wealthy peddling a shady influence racket, has a 26% confidence rating with Gallup.
The media, deservingly, is near the bottom of the list. Americans, in fact, have more trust in the Supreme Court than they do state-run schools or unions or big business or banks or the criminal justice system.
The president is correct in noting that the court has abnormally upheld the Constitution in recent years. Even then, majority concurrences are quite diverse. And the notion that the textualists walk lockstep more than the Left is a complete fantasy, as the last session showed.
Lifetime appointments for justices are meant to shield the high court from the vagaries and fleeting pressures of political debate. That is exactly what bothers the Left the most: the Supreme Court doing its job. If we knew exactly when confirmation votes were going to take place, the process would degenerate into an even uglier partisan mess. That, again, is exactly what the anti-norm leftist desires.
Indeed, the Democrats’ plan to pack the Supreme Court, the last properly functioning institution in D.C., is an attack on the constitutional order.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books – the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.” His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.
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