Supreme Court Commission: Reforms Needed or Not That Could Pass into Law

 

History of USSC Seats 

(From origin to present)

How we got to this point to increase or not the USSC. A study commission has been appointed by President Biden. That story from Vox.com with this headline:

“Biden’s Supreme Court Reform Commission Won’t Fix Anything”

Not that long ago, the idea of adding additional seats to the Supreme Court in order to change its partisan makeup was considered very radical.

FDR proposed doing so in 1937 in order to neutralize a Court that frequently struck down his * New Deal programs on spurious legal grounds, but his proposal was unpopular and ultimately went nowhere.

* COMPARISONS: On March 4, 1933, during the bleakest days of the Great Depression, newly elected president, FDR delivered his first inaugural address before 100,000 people on Washington’s Capitol Plaza. 

He started this speech this: “First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

He promised that he would act swiftly to face the “dark realities of the moment,” and he assured Americans that he would “wage a war against the emergency just as though we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” 

His speech gave many people confidence that they’d elected a man who was not afraid to take bold steps to solve the nation’s problems.

Now here were are again basically suffering greatly under the coronavirus pandemic and with no firm end in sight. 

Newly-President Joe Biden is taking a page out of the FDR playbook mostly for the same reasons: (1) to provide aid to Americans hurting, (2) putting the economy back on track, (3) solving unemployment, and (4) keeping healthcare in top shape in a deeply divided nation and more so with this Congress, the GOP mostly, bent on stopping Biden at all costs.

Yet several crucial events happened in recent years that convinced many Democrats that the federal judiciary is unfairly stacked against them.

For example, in 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February, the Senate Republican majority under Mitch McConnell refused to even give a committee confirmation hearing to President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, then D.C. District Appeals Court Judge and now the AG, Merrick Garland. They claimed there was not enough time to confirm a Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year (which was nearly 9 months away).

Then, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, the very same Republicans still under McConnell immediately abandoned their previous position that they invented and used to scuttle Garland’s nomination for the vacancy as then President Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. 

She was confirmed just eight days before the 2020 election, which also threw Trump out of office in November 2020.

In the interim between Garland’s unsuccessful nomination and Barrett’s successful one, Democrats endured two other significant traumas. 

The first was that Trump became president, despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Republicans also controlled the Senate for the entirety of Trump’s presidency — control thanks to malapportionment. 

The Democratic “minority” in the Senate represented millions more Americans than the Republican “majority” during Trump’s presidency. 

Indeed, all three of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators who represented less than half of the country.

The second trauma was the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was credibly accused of attempting to rape Dr. Christine Blasey Ford while Kavanaugh and Ford were both in high school. 

Kavanaugh responded to these allegations with an angry rant before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he seemed to threaten retaliation against Democrats for repeating the allegations against him — telling the committee: “What goes around comes around.”

All of this contributed to a sense among Democrats that the Court has become too partisan, and led many prominent Democrats to conclude that radical action was necessary to prevent a GOP-led Supreme Court from dismantling voting rights and otherwise entrenching Republican power.

Yet, when candidate Biden was asked about whether he’d support radical reforms such as adding seats to the Supreme Court, he initially said he opposed these reforms.

Then after Justice Ginsburg’s death, he took a more agnostic stance, saying that, while he’s “not been a fan of court-packing,” his approach to the issue would depend on how the Barrett confirmation fight played out. 

Now that Barrett’s been confirmed and on the bench, Biden appears to be signaling with his new commission that significant reforms to the Supreme Court will not be on the table.

Full story continues at the main link.

My 2 Cents: The commission is a good idea to see what legal experts and experienced legal minds think… whether or not any changes come forth would of course have to pass congress and that too is part of the problem, but we shall see.

The public should be interested as well since high court decisions affect our lives in many ways. So stay tuned to the important issue at this time in our history.

Thanks for stopping by.