Democratic lawmakers are pushing to change the Supreme Court. Demands to “pack the court” began in earnest during the 2020 election after former President Donald Trump saw his three nominees to the high court confirmed. Those calls have seen a revival in recent weeks following multiple rulings from the latest SCOTUS term.
Several high-profile decisions led to repeated criticism of and calls to change the so-called “conservative” court that moved rightward with the confirmations of Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
So what proposals to change the court have actually been floated?
With a new Congress in 2021, Democrats pushed a bill to expand the Supreme Court from nine justices to 13. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., rejected the legislation, saying she had “no intention to bring it to the floor,” Politico reported.
University of Tennessee law professor and founder of InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds wrote a piece for Newsweek this week suggesting that court be expanded to 59 seats.
Looking back on the June incident where a suspect was arrested for threatening to kill Justice Kavanaugh, Reynolds wrote, “Indisputably, we live in a time when assassinating, impeaching, or otherwise removing a single Supreme Court Justice could flip a closely divided Court on important national issues, and when more and more extremists are talking about using violence to get their way in politics.”
“On a court with nine members divided 5-4 on many issues, you only have to get rid of one person. Especially when that person would be replaced by a president of the other party, as would have happened if Kavanaugh had been killed,” he continued. “That’s too appealing a target for some of the crazies out there, especially when ‘respectable’ people in the press and in politics are egging on the anger.”
Reynolds then offered an idea to make the court more “resilient”: add 50 justices to the court, one from each state.
“Each state’s governor would nominate a member of the Court from his or her state, who would then be confirmed by the Senate as usual,” he explained.
The likelihood of changing the court’s size is small, especially since President Joe Biden has said he’s not on board with the idea. And the American people don’t like it either. A new poll taken after the court overturned Roe v. Wade last month showed that most Americans (54%) still oppose the idea of expanding the court. Just a third (34%) said they were OK with it.
But changing the size of the court is not the Democrats’ only proposal.
Several lawmakers are proposing term limits for Supreme Court justices, which would allow each president to appoint at least one justice. One proposal from Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., would create 18-year terms for members of the high court. The bill would create a system in which the president would have a scheduled Supreme Court appointment every two years.
However, legal analysts have noted that creating term limits for justices would require a constitutional amendment since Article III of the U.S. Constitution grants federal judges lifetime appointments.
