Packing the Supreme Court, GOP-Style
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | October 15, 2020
“McConnell’s day as the czar of the Senate may be ending soon. It cannot come soon enough.”
Led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, congressional Republicans are raising concerns that Democrats may try to “pack” the Supreme Court by adding seats to the Court if they win control of the Presidency and Congress in November.
McConnell, of all people, has publicly called out Vice President Joe Biden for his unwillingness to firmly oppose adding new seats to the Supreme Court. In an act of pure chutzpah, McConnell brazenly warned about the dangers of court packing, stating that “Court-packing by either party would guarantee retribution when the Senate and the White House next changed hands. The escalation would not end. Our independent judiciary would spiral into one more partisan battleground. And the judgments of Supreme Court would be delegitimized.”
This comes from a man who, in two acts of supreme hypocrisy, in essence, stole two Supreme Court seats for conservative Justices.
Led by President Trump and Senator McConnell, Republicans have “packed” the federal courts during the past four years with conservative and rightwing judges to the extent that the scales of justice are now tipped way out of balance in one ideological direction.
And now that Republicans have violated every norm in the books to “pack” the Supreme Court with a deeply conservative 6-to-3 majority, McConnell and other Republicans are raising concerns that the Democrats may not passively accept their fate.
It is by no means clear whether there is majority support among Senate Democrats for adding seats to the Supreme Court. What there is, however, is legitimate anger and outrage at McConnell’s hypocritical and indefensible conduct.
In 2016, McConnell held open the seat vacated by the death of Justice Scalia for 10 months on the false justification that the American people should be given “a voice in the filling of this vacancy” by their choice of a new president.
In 2020, however, when Justice Ginsburg died in the final weeks of the presidential election, McConnell reversed everything he had said before and has acted to deny the American people a voice in filling this Supreme Court vacancy through the imminent presidential election.
McConnell is now slamming Trump’s Supreme Court nominee through the Senate at warp-speed in an unprecedented process to beat the presidential election.
McConnell’s day as the czar of the Senate may be ending soon. It cannot come soon enough.
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