“When you can’t win the game, change the rules.”
That seems to be the motto of the far left these days. Not content to play by the rules, it hopes to tilt the playing field to its own advantage and in the process transform American politics.
Here are four ways it has proposed doing that.
1. Packing the Supreme Court
A number of Democratic presidential hopefuls have floated the idea of adding new seats on the Supreme Court.
To begin with, this is something the Constitution gives Congress the power to determine. But this isn’t the first time the political branches have played politics with the Supreme Court by trying to tinker with the number of seats.
Congress initially set the number at six justices (including the chief justice) when it passed the Judiciary Act of 1789. Then, in the waning days of President John Adams’ presidency, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801, known as the “Midnight Judges Act,” which reduced the number of Supreme Court justices to five and created a number of new circuit court judgeships to be filled by Adams before his rival, Thomas Jefferson, took office.
For the next 60 years, Congress periodically added new seats, and the Supreme Court reached its high-water mark with 10 justices in 1863. Following the Civil War, Congress reduced the number of seats to seven amid its battle with President Andrew Johnson over Reconstruction. Then in 1869, Congress set the number of justices at nine, where it has remained since.
The last major attempt to alter the Supreme Court’s composition was in the late 1930s. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, upset with the conservative “Four Horsemen” of the Supreme Court thwarting parts of his New Deal agenda, tried to persuade Congress to allow him to appoint a “junior justice” for every sitting justice who remained on the Supreme Court beyond age 70.
That measure failed in the Democrat-controlled Senate. But Roosevelt got the last laugh—he got to “pack” the court the old-fashioned way, and ended up appointing eight justices throughout his time in office.
So while it’s not unprecedented to alter the number of seats on the Supreme Court, proponents of “court packing” should explain why they want to do so and what kind of justices they would appoint.
Odds are, they would favor activist judges who don’t understand the proper, limited role the judiciary is supposed to play in our government. That would end up compounding the problem of an activist Supreme Court that inserts itself into matters that should be handled at the ballet box and in Congress or statehouses across the country.
2. Granting Statehood to Washington, D.C.
