Sen. Elizabeth Warren
(D-MA) is well known for lying about having Native American heritage. But, at least when it comes to her political statements, Senator Pocahontas is remarkably candid. After all, the
Massachusetts
Democrat just openly admitted that she wants to destroy the
Supreme Court
as we know it — and spark a constitutional crisis.
“I’ll just be blunt: right-wing extremists have hijacked the Supreme Court of the United States,” Warren
tweeted
on Tuesday. “From shredding abortion rights to rigging the rules against workers and consumers, an out-of-touch majority is substituting their own views for the rule of law.”
DEMOCRATIC SENATOR CALLS ON HARLAN CROW TO REVEAL GIFTS TO CLARENCE THOMAS
“For the sake of our freedoms and the sake of our democracy, we must expand the Supreme Court to rebalance it, and we need to institute a binding code of ethics for the justices,” the senator
concluded
.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but Warren’s spiel is wrong from the get-go. The idea that the Supreme Court has been “hijacked by right-wing extremists” who “substitute their own views for the rule of law” is simply unfounded.
Indeed, while Warren cites several examples where the court ruled against her “side,” in recent years, the Supreme Court has also upheld the Biden administration’s
policies
on
multiple occasions
; ruled to
expand
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights
massively
; and broken with preferred “right-wing” policies on too many other occasions to count. Agree or disagree with its legal reasoning, the idea that the current court simply rules on partisan alignment is flat-out false.
But what’s much worse is Warren’s supposed “remedy.” She proposes stuffing the Supreme Court with more justices to rig its ideological composition and force it to go along with the Democratic agenda. The Senate does technically have the authority to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court, but it has had only nine justices
since 1869
. Hence why if senators were to expand the court in a partisan manner, it would lead to a crisis.
First, the Democrats would add more justices and turn it into a liberal bloc. Then, the next time Republicans took power, they’d do the same. And on and on it would go until the Supreme Court had 500 members and lost any semblance of legitimacy. Before you know it, we’d no longer have a legitimate judicial branch to keep Congress and the president in check. Even progressives such as Warren would surely regret that as soon as a Republican took the Oval Office again. (Apparently, they’re just genuinely incapable of thinking even five minutes ahead.)
What’s more, it’s particularly ironic that Warren touts court-packing as needed for “the sake of democracy.” On the contrary, as law professor Ilya Somin
notes
, packing courts is “a standard tool of authoritarian populists seeking to undermine liberal democracy, recently used in such countries as Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela.”
The composition of the Supreme Court is the direct result of free and fair elections. To jury-rig it and undermine that composition is itself an attack on “democracy” and, more importantly, an attack on our system of checks and balances.
Unfortunately, Warren isn’t the only Democrat who has endorsed this dangerous and radical idea. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), and many other leaders in the party have also
endorsed court-packing
. This reckless embrace of authoritarian power grabs sure makes it a whole lot harder to take their preening about “democracy” and the “rule of law” seriously.
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Brad Polumbo (
@Brad_Polumbo
) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and the co-founder of
BASEDPolitics
.
