“Consider a country where a leader is elected in a free and fair election and then sets about chipping away slowly but surely at the pillars of democracy,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a recent speech in Ecuador. “Now, imagine that leader then seeks to use the levers of democracy to pass anti-democratic reforms — eliminating term limits, packing courts, firing legislators. That’s the story of more than one democracy in our hemisphere. And it’s one of the ways that democracies can come undone.”

Blinken is right, which is awkward for his boss, President Joe Biden, whose panel pondering the merits and methods for packing the Supreme Court has just finished its inglorious work.