At this point, it’s a foregone conclusion that, yes, if elected president and vice president, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will try adding at least one more justice to the Supreme Court. They refuse to say it outright, but it’s what Senate Democrats want, including Harris, and it’s what their hype men in the national media want.
Biden and Harris are being dishonest about why they won’t confirm or deny it, but even worse is the excuse by liberals that Democrats would be justified in doing so because Republicans had previously said they wouldn’t confirm any more justices during a presidential election year.
“Now that Democrats might respond in kind,” wrote New York Times liberal Michelle Goldberg on Monday, “diluting conservative control of the courts and thus depriving Republicans of their prize for enabling Trump, Republicans have the audacity to pose as scandalized norm-protectors.”
Her colleague Jamelle Bouie said the same thing. “If the Republican Party and its conservative defenders are going to operate,” he wrote, “according to a narrow, legalistic parsing of the rules — if they’re going to do anything and everything that isn’t expressly forbidden by the text, all in service of minority rule on an already counter-majoritarian playing field — then the only rational response is for Democrats to do the same.”
None of this is about Democrats meeting Republicans where they are in partisanship or adherence to rules, and to suggest that is the case is either hopelessly naive or, more likely, untruthful.
Democrats don’t want to add another justice to the Supreme Court as a way to get even with Republicans. They want to do it because they’re horrified what Amy Coney Barrett’s certain confirmation could mean for all of their past and future attempts at solidifying policy on abortion, immigration, free speech, and all the rest by way of the judicial system.
This wouldn’t be a one-for-one on a fast one Democrats think that Republicans were wrong to pull. This would be nothing more than an attempt to neutralize the threat that Barrett poses.
Democrats can pretend any tinkering they try with the court would be about payback for being betrayed by Republicans. It’s a lie.
