Senate Democrats and the Biden campaign, under scrutiny for a plan to expand seats on the Supreme Court, went on the offensive Sunday, claiming it is Republicans who are packing the courts.
Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, argued on Fox News Sunday the Republicans pushing through President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett before the inauguration in January is an example of court packing, despite the term’s technical meaning related to expanding the number of seats on the court.
“I’m going to be laying out the ways in which Judge Barrett’s views … are not just extreme, they’re disqualifying,” Coons said of Democrats’ strategy for Barrett’s hearings. “It constitutes court packing.”
Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee, also misused the court packing term on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, saying, “The American people have watched Republicans packing the court over the last three and a half years, and they brag about it, that they’ve taken every vacancy and filled it.”
The unpopular political strategy known as “packing the courts” goes back to Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who threatened in 1937 to add six justices to the Supreme Court, so anything the Democrats’ congressional majority did would not be stifled by the high court as unconstitutional.
Roosevelt did not follow through with his threat after two conservative justices ultimately voted to allow the expansion of federal government powers of his New Deal.
However, the term “court packing” was distorted decades later by Democratic politicians, journalists, and talking heads, during President George W. Bush’s term, to describe appointing conservative judicial nominees to the federal court system.
The Biden-Harris campaign moved forward with the strategy to attempt to redefine the idea of court packing as well.
During her debate with Vice President Mike Pence, California Sen. Kamala Harris, when asked if Joe Biden would pack the high court, replied, “Honest Abe said it’s not the right thing to do,” citing President Abraham Lincoln waiting to name Justice Roger Taney’s successor following his death.
“The American people deserve to make the decision about who will be the next president of the United States, and then that person can select who will serve for a lifetime on the highest court of our land.”
When pressed further by Pence, she pivoted and responded, “Do you know that of the 50 people who President Trump nominated to the courts for lifetime appointments, not one is Black?” Harris added, “This is what they’ve been doing. You want to talk about packing the courts, let’s have that discussion.”
Most recently, as he departed for a stop in Erie, Pennsylvania, Biden deflected the court packing question from reporters again and, like his Democrat colleagues, accused Republicans of committing this act.
“Look, the only court packing is going on right now. It’s going on with the Republicans packing the court now,” Biden argued, saying that “it’s not constitutional what they’re doing.”
