President Trump on Tuesday dismissed a proposal backed by a growing number of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates to add seats to the Supreme Court.
“I wouldn’t entertain that,” Trump told reporters during a joint press conference with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. “The only reason that they’re doing that is they want to catch up, so if they can’t catch up through the ballot box by winning an election, they want to try doing it in a different way. We would have no interest in that whatsoever.”
Trump added that an expansion of the Supreme Court would not happen while he is president.
“It won’t happen,” he said.
Several Democratic presidential hopefuls have said they are open to the idea of expanding the Supreme Court to more than nine members as retribution for Republicans blocking a number of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees, including Judge Merrick Garland, his pick to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
Trump says “it’ll never happen” when asked about the Democrats’ idea of adding more judges to the Supreme Court.
“If they can’t catch up in an election, they’ll just try and catch up in another way.” pic.twitter.com/vhwrN9eSde
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 19, 2019
“We are on the verge of a crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court,” Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., told Politico. “We have to take this challenge head on, and everything is on the table to do that.”
Other Democrats running for president who have expressed interest in an expansion of the Supreme Court include Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.
Since assuming the presidency, Trump, with the assistance of the GOP-controlled Senate, has been tremendously successful with remaking the federal judiciary. He has appointed a record number of judges to the federal courts of appeals and for the first time in his presidency flipped an appeals court to have a majority of Republican-appointed judges last week.
Trump has also named two justices to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
[Related: 2020 Dems weigh Supreme Court expansion]
