Ok, here's where we are. Republican, Democrat, Independent, whatever.
Everyone agrees when it comes to the Supreme Court that it's gotten too partisan and too political.
Every single Supreme Court nomination is a nuclear bloodbath. So what can we do? We're not going to
get the Republicans to be less partisan, we're not going to get the Democrats to be less partisan,
but what we can do is make each Supreme Court justice nomination
not as big a deal. How do you do that? Well here's a new idea that people have been floating around,
you add more Supreme Court justices. Just like there's 435 people in the House,
so each individual House race doesn't matter that much in totality, it doesn't have to be nine
Supreme Court justices. Now lots of people have come forward endorsing this plan;
Presidential candidates, prominent publications like The New York Times. So I'm not sure it's the
right thing to do, but I am sure that this is a new idea that we should definitely consider.
Come on Michael, even you have to know this is not a new idea. It was tried in the 1930s
under Franklin Roosevelt. And by the way he started it off completely dishonestly.
He more or less said, "we have a lot of elderly justices on the Court,
and they're having a difficult time keeping up with the workload. So how about if I add
an extra justice for everyone on the Court who is over age 70 and doesn't retire!"
Well nobody really fell for that, and eventually he made things more or less clear by saying, in
effect, "look I'm doing this because the people on the Court have this old fashioned jurisprudence."
And in English that means, "they're striking down my laws. They're striking down the Agricultural
Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and I fear they're going to strike down a
lot more." So, he came out and said "we're going to add a bunch of new justices." Now, even though
the Democrats totally dominated both houses of Congress at that time, the idea still didn't get
any traction, and in fact the Senate Judiciary Committee speaking about the Court packing bill
spoke this way about it, "It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its
parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America."
So if we're going to look at the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of what's constitutional,
it seems pretty clear that having a president simply put in as many people as he wants that
agree with him takes away the reason the Supreme Court is even there to begin with. In that case,
it's not the Judicial Branch, it becomes the judicial department of the Executive Branch.
And then in that case what's the point of even having it at all?
What ends up happening is that the Supreme Court almost becomes like the President's cabinet.
He or she gets a bunch of people that will do his bidding, pass them through Congress,
and now they're there to rubber stamp his legislation.
And then in that case, whatever happened to your independent, impartial judicial body?
Let's talk about a soccer game. What if the coach says, "look, my team's not doing well here.
We have to make sure that the playing field is adjusted accordingly." But instead of having a
level playing field you put the field at an angle so all the soccer balls are going downhill toward
your side. Is that fair? Is that reasonable? Is that looking at the law objectively and honestly?
Or is it forcing an outcome that you would want to have happen which is ostensibly not what the law
and Supreme Court is supposed to be about. Just because you have a fire extinguisher in your house
doesn't mean you should feel free to start fires to see how it plays out.