As the idea of packing the courts starts to become a more mainstream position on the Left, Democrats are now laying the groundwork for such a move by lying about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s efforts to confirm conservative judges.
On Tuesday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the campaign arm seeking to return Democrats to the majority in the Senate, tweeted that “Mitch McConnell’s court-packing agenda” was to “Confirm extreme right-wing judicial nominees as quickly as possible.”
Mitch McConnell’s court-packing agenda:
– Confirm extreme right-wing judicial nominees as quickly as possible.
– Confirm extreme right-wing judicial nominees as quickly as possible.
– Confirm extreme right-wing judicial nominees as quickly as possible.
We must #DitchMitch— Senate Democrats (@dscc) April 16, 2019
This, of course, is a lie. Court-packing refers to an effort to expand the number of judges on a court by the party in power so that a president can appoint more judges and tilt the ideological balance. It was attempted by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and though defeated politically, was successful in bullying the Supreme Court to issue decisions that were more favorable to his administration.
What McConnell is doing, however, is just holding more confirmation votes to fill existing court vacancies. At the time Republicans gained seats in the U.S. Senate last November, there were 111 vacancies in the district courts and 11 vacancies at the appellate level. As of this writing, there are 125 and eight, respectively, with a wave of confirmations coming.
McConnell is able to move more quickly to confirm more nominees in large part because of the decision of Harry Reid, the former Democratic leader, to trigger the nuclear option in 2013, thus allowing nominees to be confirmed with a simple majority. McConnell recently built on Reid’s move by limiting debate time on nominees, thus speeding up the votes. Whatever one believes about McConnell’s tactics, changing the Senate rules to fill existing judicial vacancies is far from the same thing as expanding the number of seats.
Of course, DSCC officials know that they’re lying. But at the same time, they know if they muddy the waters and convince people that McConnell is engaging in “court-packing” it lays the groundwork for Democrats to pack the courts when they take over.
Liberals, who are still stewing over McConnell’s success in blocking the Merrick Garland nomination to the Supreme Court, and in getting the Justice Brett Kavanaugh nomination across the finish line, are explicitly arguing in favor of packing the courts. And they’ve gotten several Democratic presidential contenders to signal openness to the the idea. Now, they’re trying to point to McConnell and argue that it’s Republicans who did it first.
