The California Congressman Ro Khanna is only the latest high-profile Democrat to insist that the time has come to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices. The plan, of course, is for justices who can be appointed by some future Democrat president and confirmed by a Senate controlled by the same party. Before him, former presidential nominee Kamala Harris proclaimed the need for a “no bad ideas” summit that would prominently include court packing on the agenda. The claim Democrats have repeatedly made is that Republicans “already packed the court” by denying President Barack Obama an appointment after the death of Justice Scalia.
While the Democrats had a reasonable ground upon which to protest when Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he would not proceed with a confirmation for Obama’s choice (Merrick Garland), it is deeply misleading to claim the move amounted to “court packing.” McConnell essentially argued the Senate could leave the appointment up to the American people with the upcoming presidential election. Were Democrats to do the same should they control the Senate when a Republican president is in office, the GOP could raise no protest. That, let us be clear, would be an even-handed response.
But to take what happened and to attempt to leverage it into some kind of right for Democrats to engage in an expansion of the court to their advantage is disproportionate and wrong. It should also be noted that Republicans have generally dealt fairly with the Democrats’ nominees (or at least did not attempt to defeat them via manufactured scandal), while the American left mounted massive campaigns to defeat Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Only the first effort succeeded, but the other two came close. Further, it could be argued the left virtually never misses with a nominee, while the right has often gone wrong with Earl Warren, William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Anthony Kennedy proving to be justices who moved the needle significantly in a liberal direction. If anything, it may be the case that the American left has dominated Supreme Court selections for 75 years. This recent complaining is a bit rich considering the broader history.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine )
Hunter (J.D., Ph.D.) is the provost and dean of faculty at North Greenville University in South Carolina. He is the author of The End of Secularism, Political Thought: A Student’s Guide and The System Has a Soul. His work has appeared in a wide variety of other books and journals. He is formally affiliated with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Touchstone, the Journal of Markets and Morality; the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy; and the Land Center at Southwestern Seminary.