President Joe Biden’s commission to study packing the Supreme Court is the product of a power-hungry president. At least, that is according to Biden himself.
Biden refused to answer during the campaign if he would support packing the Supreme Court, as Democrats threw a temper tantrum over the confirmation of now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Biden instead promised a commission, which was announced on Friday, and it is full of liberals who support packing the high court.
Biden’s inability to rule out the obvious power grab is made more glaring by the fact that Biden has noted that it is a power grab. In 2005, he said former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was “corrupted by power” when he pursued packing the Supreme Court in 1937. He praised those Senate Democrats who reprimanded Roosevelt and said they argued that “executive branch attempts to dominate the judiciary lead inevitably to autocratic dominance.”
“Our predecessors in the Senate showed courage that day and stood up to their president as a coequal institution,” Biden said. “And they did so not to thwart the agenda of the president, which, in fact, many agreed with; they did it to preserve our system’s checks and balances; they did it to ensure the integrity of the system.”
But Biden cares little about checks and balances or the integrity of the system. Nor does he have the same courage he is praising, as he’s unable to push back on his own party as it clamors to destroy the integrity of the judicial branch. By humoring its demands with his absurd commission, Biden is allowing himself to be “corrupted by power.”
Court-packing has been opposed by liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who recognized that it would be an assault on judicial independence. By a 13-point margin, the public also opposes the idea. Biden did, too, once, before his lifelong pursuit of the presidency shrouded what few principles he consistently held.
Packing the Supreme Court is not about “balance” or reform. It is undeniably about power, so much so that the president considering it has said so explicitly. There is no excuse for Biden not ruling this idea out immediately, and he knows that. And yet, he is still keeping it alive.
