President Joe Biden is facing a remarkable onslaught of opposition to his scheme to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with liberal judges in a bid to use his nominating powers to shift the nation’s politics in his direction.
Already a losing idea in public polls, a legal group presented the president’s court-packing commission on Wednesday with a petition from 402,537 foes, including leading legal figures such as former President Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese.
The group First Liberty Institute filed the public “comment” to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States studying calls made by Biden and Democrats during the 2020 election to consider changes to courts, including the partisanship of the Supreme Court.
The court is currently leaning conservative, potentially thwarting Biden’s agenda.
“Court-packing is a horrible, dangerous idea that Americans view as an act of pure political revenge, threatening our courts and the civil liberties of all Americans,” said Kelly Shackelford, who authored the comment and is the president of First Liberty Institute.
“An independent judiciary is an essential check on the power of the executive and legislative branches and the fleeting political whims of the culture that preserves our constitutional republic,” added Shackelford.
The full document, provided to Secrets, is shown below.
The document condemns the political nature of court-packing and calls it a break with long-standing U.S. history, including a prior packing effort.
“Given such resounding trust for the Supreme Court and the judicial system, the sobering examples of other nations, and the enormous risk to our constitutional freedoms and democratic structure, partisan court reforms would be a mistake of historic proportions. As the 1937 ‘Report on the Reorganization of the Federal Judiciary’ issued by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee concluded, court-packing’s ‘ultimate operation would be to make this government one of men rather than one of law.’ Then, as now, politically motivated court reforms lack historic precedent and legitimacy. Now is the time for staunch, bipartisan opposition to any plan that would subject the Supreme Court to a deeply politicized and damaging packing scheme,” it said.
