Having won the greatest landslide before or since (98.5% of the electoral votes, all but Vermont’s and Maine’s) and having carried the biggest congressional majorities ever, Franklin Roosevelt in 1937 proposed a possible expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose rulings had been frustrating parts of his New Deal. Even though the GOP had shriveled down to just 88 of the House’s 435 members and but 16 of 96 senators, the court plan still fizzled out.
So any prospect of Joe Biden packing a court tilted right by Mitch McConnell’s galling political deviousness — he was dead wrong to refuse to even hold a hearing to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland after the demise of Antonin Scalia in election year 2016, and dead wronger when he rammed through Amy Coney Barrett after the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg far closer to election 2020 — is zero. Biden doesn’t have the clout of FDR. The Democrats’ margin in the House is three, and the Senate is dead-even tied.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin know as much, which is why they’re wisely keeping their distance from House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler’s silly bill to add four justices. We have more hope for the 36-member bipartisan commission Biden named last week; if it steers clear of leftist fantasies, it might produce something smarter.
Packing the high court is not only politically implausible. It’s a really, really, really bad idea — answering legitimate complaints that the nation’s top judicial panel has grown too political by turning it into a transparent tool of whatever party rules the roost at any given moment.
Even FDR didn’t blatantly try to pile on justices. He had a more clever approach, allowing the president to permanently add a justice for each incumbent older than 70, up to six more. The scheme still died, even though it was backed by America’s largest newspaper.
We were wrong, as was FDR. As is anyone pushing Biden to contort the court.
This editorial first appeared in the New York Daily News on Monday. This commentary should be considered another point of view and not necessarily the opinion or editorial policy of The Dominion Post.
