Tag: Supreme Court

Ghost of an Argument

On the 73rd anniversary of the birth of Hillary Clinton, the United States Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Mrs. Clinton, the former Democratic presidential candidate, looms in the background of the issue as a sort of éminence grise, a specter of the politics of the left. Had she won in 2016, late luminary RBG would have been replaced by a progressive woman. Not ACB.

For what would have been Hillary’s, count ’em, third nomination.

Not a specter, or grisey eminence, is Senator Kamala Harris (D‑Calif.), Joe Biden’s partner in procuring 2020’s big prize.

“I’m on my way to the Senate floor to vote no on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court,” Harris tweeted, yesterday. “Health coverage for millions of people hinges on who fills this seat. It’s clear that this nominee has the potential to do great harm to the American people.”

Note that this complaint has nothing to do with actual judicial qualifications. It has to do with a policy that Democrats insist upon: socialized medical billing. But as ACB made clear in the hearings, her judicial mindset is about legal process, as it should be, not government policy.

An hour later, candidate Harris asserted that Senate Republicans had “denied the will of the American people by confirming a Supreme Court justice through an illegitimate process.”

Illegitimate?

Well, you see, “more than 62 million people have already voted.” That is it. Harris pretends that since there is an election next week, and some people have already voted, the normal, constitutional business of Congress should not go on.

Anything to rescue their broken policy, Obamacare.

Next week’s election sure will have consequences, but ACB’s stint on the Court resulted from Hillary’s quite legitimate loss.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Biden’s Court-Packing Scheme

Post author By Editor
Post date October 12, 2020
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Joe Biden, Supreme Court, court packing, election, Democracy

Hold on! What scheme am I talking about?

Joe Biden hasn’t said that he agrees with other Democrats (including former Democratic presidential candidates) who propose that the U.S. Congress act to dramatically expand the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Joe Biden hasn’t said that at all.

In his first and so-far-only debate with President Trump he refused to say, because if he did then that would become the issue.

“The issue is the American people should speak,” he said, and then turned to the camera. “You should go out and vote. … Vote and let your senators know how strongly you feel. Vote now. Make sure you in fact let people know.”

Know what, precisely? To vote to allow a Democratic administration to seize control of the Court, overcoming any constitutional objections to his (or her) socialist schemes?

But then Biden turned against the voters, when asked on Friday, whether voters deserve to know where he stands on court-packing: “No, they don’t deserve” to know. “I’m not going to play his [Trump’s] game. . . .”

So, officially, we “don’t know” whether Biden supports packing the High Court the way FDR tried in 1937.

Do voters deserve better from Biden?

They do not!

O, those voters — always demanding to know positions and agendas and things. Playing right into the hands of the opposition.

Come on, man! Ya gotta vote for the guy to know what’s in him.

I know what’s on your mind. You’re asking, “Are you saying that Joe Biden’s coy covertness toward the imposition of one-party authoritarian government exemplifies a crude disdain for voters’ legitimate desire to know what their vote will get them and is even more disqualifying than his stealth court-packing scheme?”

Please. Don’t put words in my mouth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Yes, We Can

“She was an amazing woman, whether you agree or not,” a visibly saddened President Trump offered reporters upon hearing that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had passed away. She had “led an amazing life,” he added.

Not amazing enough, however, to nudge Mr. Trump to wait and let the next president nominate Ginsberg’s successor — either himself or a coin toss between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris should Democrats win.

That delay was reportedly the justice’s dying wish.

The president’s opponents would certainly prefer that, too, but Trump vows to quickly name his third High Court replacement.

And why not? There is a vacancy; he has the constitutional power.

Sure, Republican senators will be charged with hypocrisy. And accurately, because they blocked President Obama’s 2016 pick of Merrick Garland, claiming the voters should decide by choosing the “next president.” Just as Senate Democrats will be orating the opposite of what they said four years ago.

Hypocrisy is as close to half-right as folks in Washington ever seem to get.

But what should you want your so-called representative who currently takes up space in the U.S. Senate to do now?

Same as always: The right thing.

Unfortunately, not likely.

Always hyping violations of “democratic norms,” it may be the Democrats threatening (again) to blow up the democratic norm of a stable Court. In a Washington Post op-ed, attorney and journalist Jill Fillpovic urged Democrats to “pack the court” if Republicans move ahead in confirming a justice and Democrats win the White House and Senate this November. Though, she advises, “if they’re smart, Democrats will find a more palatable [term].”

How about a more palatable approach than a Year Zero re-making of the SCOTUS every time party control of the White House and Senate changes?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Exhibit A+

“Do you really want me to rule the country?” Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch pointedly asked CNN’s Ariane de Vogue.

“It is not a judge’s job to do whatever he or she thinks is good,” Gorsuch added, in response to her concern that judicial activism might sometimes be “needed.”

“We wrote a Constitution; we put down what we wanted to put in it,” explained President Trump’s first SCOTUS pick. “We can amend it when we wish, and it is not up to nine people to tell 330 million Americans how to live.”

Gorsuch is making the media rounds promoting his new book, A Republic, If You Can Keep It — borrowing Ben Franklin’s famous quip when asked about what form of government the delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention had produced.

Gorsuch follows the judicial philosophy of originalism, criticizing interpretations that jigger the Constitution with the times. “You know, the living Constitution is going to take your rights away,” the justice argues, “and it’s going to add ones that aren’t there.”

And defending the rights actually in the Constitution means, Gorsuch believes, that judges must enforce limits on government. Last weekend in The Wall Street Journal, Kyle Peterson noted that Gorsuch has been true to that mission, pushing back against the High Court’s longtime deference to the administrative state.

This philosophy puts him beyond partisanship. “Gorsuch voted with liberal justices on important decisions on surveillance and sentencing,” Jonathan Turley writes in The Hill. “He also joined in key decisions supporting free speech against the government.…”

All this makes Neil Gorsuch the best justice on the Supreme Court. Perhaps the best in my lifetime.

And surely Exhibit A in Mr. Trump’s case for reelection.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Heal or Heel?

Supreme Court, packing, packed, red, blue, Republican,Democrat, right, left, partisan,

Call it High Court chutzpah?

In a Second Amendment case seeking U.S. Supreme Court review, five U.S. Senators have filed an amicus curie or “friend of the court” brief … that wasn’t very friendly.

“The Supreme Court is not well,” argue Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D‑R.I.), Richard Blumenthal (D‑Conn.), Mazie Hirono (D‑Hawaii), Richard Durbin (D‑Ill.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D‑N.Y.) in their brief against the Court accepting the case. “Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.’”

A not-very-veiled threat.

Is their goal really to ‘reduce political influence’? Or to leverage influence against the Court should it not “heal itself” — or come to heel — by authoring judicial decisions more to Democrats’ liking?

Seven Democratic presidential contenders, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kristen Gillibrand, support court packing — having the next Democrat-controlled Congress increase the size of the SCOTUS beyond nine justices, to 12 or 15.

“[M]ost Americans recognize this tactic for what it is, which is a direct attack on the independence of the Supreme Court,” Sarah Turberville and Anthony Marcum write in The Hill. “It is no coincidence that court packing is employed by would be autocrats all over the world rather than by leaders of liberal democracies.”

To supposedly “depoliticize” the “partisan” Supreme Court, Mayor Pete Buttigieg wants to pick five justices to represent Democrats and five to represent Republicans, and then those ten would together choose five additional justices.

Nothing like being overtly partisan to vanquish partisanship, eh?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies Popular term limits U.S. Constitution

The Court-Packers

Supreme Court, NPC, packing the court, FDR, law, justice, constitution

“What if there were five justices selected by Democrats,” presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke explored at an Iowa campaign stop, “five justices selected by Republicans, and those ten then pick five more justices independent of those who picked the first ten?”

Beto, meet FDR.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried something similar with the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, which would have added six new justices to the nine-justice U.S. Supreme Court. It failed in the Senate, even though FDR’s Democratic Party controlled the chamber.

This “court packing” gambit may have been the most unpopular action of FDR’s whopping three-plus terms.

Despite the obvious self-interested power grab, “Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand … would not rule out expanding the Supreme Court if elected president,” Politico reported.

“It’s not just about expansion, it’s about depoliticizing the Supreme Court,” Sen. Warren explained … with a straight face. Yet Beto’s suggested reform would officially turn the nation’s highest court into a partisan, two-party political institution.

To the good, Democrats are also bantering about term limits for the nation’s High Court. Trouble is, term limits require a constitutional amendment, meaning a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress as well as 38-state ratification.

Court packing, on the other hand, only requires simple majorities of both houses and the presidency. Which Democrats threaten in 2020.

“You need to gain power,” Washington Examiner columnist Philip Wegmann reminds, “before you can abuse it.”

So the abuse, for now, is merely promising.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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