Democrats will oftentimes play the Abigail Spanberger card by working with legacy media to hide their radicalism from voters. But when it comes to their goal of packing the Supreme Court with left-wing activists, they’ve taken the mask completely off.
Since the release of its Louisiana v. Callais decision nuking race-based redistricting, Democrats have revamped their intention to add more justices to the high court as a means of acquiring judicial outcomes that benefit their party. While some have employed coy language about SCOTUS “reforms,” others have been straightforward in their desire to destroy one of America’s last functioning institutions by stacking the court with leftists.
“This is the most partisan Supreme Court in the history of the nation. Time to add term limits and more justices,” wrote Eric Swalwell’s BFF Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., in a Monday X post.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., followed suit on Tuesday. The California Democrat wrote that the “next Democratic White House does not need a court reform commission like some college seminar,” but that, “We need action.”
“We need term limits for Justices. We need to expand this morally bankrupt Court from 9 to 13,” Khanna wrote.
In calling for “court reform,” Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., also backed Democrat plans to “Expand the Court” and “Set term limits” as a way of stopping what she characterized as “systematic” “Attacks on our voting rights.”
The officials are but a few of the many Democrats or other leftists who have telegraphed — if not outright declared — their support for packing the Supreme Court since Callais‘ release.
While having psychotic meltdowns at not getting their way is nothing new for the left, the open embrace of such power-hungry tactics underscores how Democrats have historically viewed the Supreme Court, and how the body has become yet another flashpoint in the battle for control of Congress.
As Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway detailed in her new book, Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution, leftist control of the high court throughout much of the 20th century turned an institution meant for interpreting the law into one that invented law via activist rulings. Under the Warren and Burger Courts, SCOTUS “had functioned as a super-legislature, enacting the Left’s policies by a majority vote of justices, no matter what the Constitution said.”
“The Left had come to view the Court as its rightful property and would not cede control willingly,” Hemingway wrote.
As Republican presidents and the conservative legal movement got better at elevating individuals who would properly interpret the Constitution as written to the bench, the left’s control of SCOTUS steadily waned. Now, with a majority of appointed originalists, the high court is no longer available to Democrats to ram their radical agenda into law with zero input from the American people and their elected representatives.
This reality and the wave of constitutional decisions from the conservative justices are what’s driving the left’s bid to stack the court with Ketanji Brown Jackson-style activists — leftists who will make decisions based on what’s best for the Democrat Party, not the rule of law.
And while potential Supreme Court appointments have long been a facet of federal elections throughout America (see the 2016 presidential race), the dynamic has now changed.
These elections are no longer just about which party gets to appoint justices to the Supreme Court. They’re about whether the number of justices will remain the same or if Democrats will get to pack the court and turn it back into a de-facto legislature that invents new constitutional “rights” as a majority of its members see fit.
Should Democrats succeed in their goal, the high court’s legitimacy would shatter, and so too America’s separation of powers.
