Supreme Court packing just the latest Dem effort to control the court
Washington Examiner
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Many Democratic leaders just won’t give up their nefarious court-packing schemes. They also keep repeating flagrant falsehoods to support the idea.
Last week, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and other Democrats introduced a bill to expand the Supreme Court from nine seats to 13. The goal, obviously, is to rig the high court for the Left to take over what is considered a 6-3 conservative majority.
COURT-PACKING ISN’T JUST CONSTITUTIONAL LUNACY – IT’S POLITICAL SUICIDE
As we have argued before, court-packing flies in the face of history, tradition, and logic, not to mention legitimacy in the eyes of the public. The court has stood at nine members for 154 years and has exceeded that number only once during the emergency of the Civil War.
That case is easy to make. What bears recapitulation is the refutation of the Left’s falsehoods to remind the public of the record of 40 years of judicial nomination battles.
Markey’s explanation for the latest court-packing bill was mendacious to the max.
“When a bully steals your lunch money in the schoolyard, you have to do something about it, or else the bully will come back over and over again,” he said. “So we’re in this fight, and we’re going to reclaim these seats. We’re not going to allow the bully to win.”
Markey is alleging that conservatives or Republicans have been the collective “bully” in the court fights. The facts show the opposite. For four decades, the Left has abused the process, with Republicans being the victims.
By the middle of President Ronald Reagan’s first term, the Left was using the American Bar Association to scuttle judicial nominees on spurious ideological grounds. By 1986, leftists earned their first major scalp by blocking the judicial nomination of Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, leveling accusations of “racism” against him despite the public record strongly indicating the opposite.
Successful in that endeavor, they used what then were utterly unprecedented bullying tactics to block the Supreme Court nomination of the eminently qualified Judge Robert Bork, with Massachusetts’ Sen. Ted Kennedy unleashing a screed against Bork so defamatory that “borking” became a new word in the political lexicon meaning false and extreme character assassination. It was the forerunner of cancel culture.
The bullying was followed by the ludicrous, last-minute smear attempt in 1991 to try to stop the high court nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas, which failed when the public by a five-to-three margin disbelieved accuser Anita Hill’s fabulations. After that experience, though, no less a personage than then-Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden said the Senate should refuse even to hold hearings for a Supreme Court vacancy that arises in an election year.
At the lower court levels, Biden and company already were engaged in an unprecedented blockade, refusing to advance a stunning 53 nominees of President George H.W. Bush in 1992 — usually without stated cause. Eleven of these were appeals court nominees, including ones as impressive as John Roberts, now the chief justice, and Frank Keating, later the Oklahoma governor who admirably handled the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing.
This blockade was a pure bully-boy tactic by the Left against conservatives — but it was child’s play compared to what was to come.
It was the Left that broke 220 years of tradition by using the filibuster, for the first time ever, to kill judicial nominations (of nominees who otherwise had majority support) rather than just delay them. Leftist activists first used the filibuster against the eminently qualified Miguel Estrada because of his ethnicity, with internal memos demanding Senate Democratic opposition to him “because … he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.”
The Democratic bullies filibustered to death the nominations of a slew of President George W. Bush’s choices, and they so abused Samuel Alito during his Supreme Court hearings that Alito’s wife left the courtroom in tears. They again implemented a without-cause blockade of Bush judges at the end of his term, letting 30 nominations lapse, some of them among the most admired people in American law. New York liberal Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2007 repeated the Biden standard that no Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed in an election year.
And, of course, it was leftists who horribly abused the process, and all decency, by advancing calumnious accusations that Judge Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly had participated in “train” rapes.
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By contrast, not a single Democratic Supreme Court nomination in more than half a century has been in doubt, and no Democratic nominees to appellate courts have been subjected to personal character assassinations the way Republican nominees have.
The bullying has all been from one side — Markey’s side. The most egregious bullying of all would be to let Markey and his ilk change the makeup of the Supreme Court for purely partisan gain.