A Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee described expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court as a necessary “reform.”
During an interview with CNN, Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono said “court packing,” which the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said was a “bad idea,” would make the high court more “objective.”
“This is long-overdue court reform, as far as I’m concerned. And I’ve been thinking about court reform and what we can do regarding the Supreme Court to make it so much more objective. And so, this is not something that a lot of us have not thought about,” Hirono said, though noting Democrats must first gain power to do so. “We only have a serious discussion about any of these things if the Democrats take back the Senate.”
Ginsburg, who died at the age of 87 on Friday following a battle with cancer, told NPR last year that court packing would only make the Supreme Court appear more partisan, not objective. “If anything would make the court appear partisan,” she said. “It would be that — one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.'”
Democrats, including presidential nominee Joe Biden, have demanded President Trump to wait until there is a winner in the November election. Some have even suggested that if Republicans push through a nominee and the Democrats take control of Congress in November, they will vote to expand the Supreme Court. Trump, who says he will pick a woman for the high court, said on Tuesday that he will announce his nominee on Saturday.
Biden, who previously expressed opposition to court packing, declined on Tuesday to say whether or not he agreed with the idea after the election.
In 1937, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced a plan to expand the size of the Supreme Court from nine to nearly 15 justices, which critics said was a partisan attempt to have the high court green-light the president’s New Deal programs. That plan never came to fruition.
