Report: Biden Creating Commission To Study Court-Packing

The New York Times is reporting that President Biden will order the formation of a commission to study expanding the Supreme Court, an idea many have labeled 'court-packing.'

The New York Times is reporting that President Biden will order the formation of a commission to study expanding the Supreme Court, an idea many have labeled ‘court-packing.’

Biden, the Times states according to White House officials, “will order a 180-day study of adding seats to the Supreme Court, making good on a campaign-year promise to … examine the potentially explosive subjects of expanding the court or setting term limits for justices.”

The panel will be co-chaired by Bob Bauer, who was a Biden campaign lawyer, and will include members such as far-left legal scholar Laurence Tribe and Caroline Fredrickson, former president of the American Constitution Society.

Fredrickson, according to a Politico column from earlier this year, “has hinted that she is intellectually supportive of ideas like court expansion.”

The panel will have conservative members as well.

The Commission will be tasked with “examining the history of the court, past changes to the process of nominating justices, and the potential consequences to altering the size of the nation’s highest court,” the New York Times contends.

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Rumors Of Court-Packing Have Been Ongoing

The extreme left has made it quite clear they will at least consider packing the Supreme Court as a means to blunt the ruling of the conservative majority.

The New York Times repeatedly notes former President Trump’s “conservative mark” on the court as a reason to consider such an extreme measure.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both played coy about their intent on the matter during the campaign.

Biden wouldn’t reveal his position per se until after the election, but did warn that he would convene a national commission to study reforms for the Supreme Court.

He appears to be keeping that promise.

“We are on the verge of a crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court,” Harris would later tell Politico. “We have to take this challenge head-on, and everything is on the table to do that.”

It seemed quite obvious that this is where we were heading, regardless of the evasions that came from the future occupants of the White House.

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A Bonehead Idea

The New York Times report mentions how conservatives have denounced court-packing by comparing it to a similar failed effort by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.

That effort by FDR was one that Biden himself called a “bonehead idea” during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 1983.

“President Roosevelt clearly had the right to send to the United States Senate and the United States Congress a proposal to pack the court,” Biden argued.

He continued, “But it was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make.”

“It put in question, if for an entire decade, the independence of the most significant body … in this country, the Supreme Court of the United States of America,” he definitively stated.

Another person opposed to FDR’s move was the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In an interview with NPR in 2019, Ginsburg opposed the idea of expanding the court.

“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” she said, adding, “I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.”

One ‘bad idea’ and another ‘bonehead idea’ – of course President Biden is going to look into it.

 

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Rusty Weiss has been covering politics for over 15 years. His writings have appeared in the Daily Caller, Fox ... More about Rusty Weiss
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