Ecclesiastes 1:9: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
The year was 1937. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was fresh off a landslide reelection and was in the process of implementing the New Deal. But, he faced a major problem: a string of losses at the Supreme Court deemed key portions of the bill unconstitutional and left the fate of the New Deal in question.
Roosevelt’s solution to these defeats came in the form of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. This bill would have allowed President Roosevelt to add six additional justices to the bench, which Roosevelt thought would yield a court that was more favorable to New Deal legislation. In other words: pack as many sympathetic judges as possible into the court and avoid the pain points of “constitutionality” and “legality.” Thankfully, Republicans and Democrats united to oppose Roosevelt’s Judicial Reform Bill and the threat it posed to the Court’s independence.
Nearly 50 years later, lawmakers across the aisle continued to acknowledge the problems and erosion of trust caused by Roosevelt’s court packing proposals:
“[President Roosevelt] violated no law, he was legalistically absolutely correct, but it was a bone-head idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make, and it put in question, for an entire decade, the independence of the most significant body, including the Congress in my view, the most significant body in this country – the Supreme Court of the United States of America.”
– Senator Joseph R. Biden, July 13, 1983
Fast forward to present day and Washington DC Democrats are singing a different tune, now-President Joe Biden included. Perhaps there’s been a fundamental shift in the service of justice. Or, more likely, they’re sour about the three new justices appointed by Donald Trump. Still, Democrats have filed legislation in both houses of Congress to add four justices to the Supreme Court in a thinly veiled effort to change the ideological composition of the Court.
Of course, this doesn’t even fly with the most liberal Americans. Liberal justices like Stephen Breyer and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg have voiced concerns about court expansion. They understood that the constitution is quite clear, as Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution specifically protects the independence of the judiciary.
In 1937, the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee dismissed Roosevelt’s court packing plan as a “needless, futile and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle.” It continued to condemn the proposal as “a measure which should be emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to free representatives of the free people of America.”
And despite any altruistic statements Democrats give the media regarding a packed court, the intention is the same as Roosevelt’s all those years ago: change the Supreme Court to rule through the Supreme Court.
Democrats currently control two branches of government (by incredibly narrow margins). And,in their hunger for complete control in Washington to impose their misguided policies on the American people, they have increasingly turned to the judicial branch to circumvent the legislative process.
We the People believes in the separation of powers, the merits of an independent judiciary and the system of checks and balances our founding fathers wove into the fabric of our Constitution. Although court packing is not new under the sun, neither is the passion Americans possess to fight back against it.
Read more about the constitutionality of court packing proposals here – Henderson: Court Packing is Unconstitutional