(April 9) President Joe Biden is creating the wrong commission to solve the wrong problem regarding the federal judiciary.
Actually, it’s worse than that: Biden is solving nothing, but instead risks ruining something that actually works well and in doing so will undermine faith in the American system of justice and further violate his bad-faith promise to run a “unifying” administration.
Biden’s 36-member commission would take 180 days to analyze whether to expand the size of the Supreme Court from its long-standing number of nine justices and also whether to impose some sort of term limits on justices. While the commission will issue no recommendations, its “report” will certainly be used by advocates of court expansion as justification for “packing” the court along the lines of what President Franklin Roosevelt tried, but blessedly failed, to do in 1937.
We can be rather certain the commission is rigged to encourage this result because it is being led, not in a bipartisan fashion, but by noted liberals with close ties to the Obama-Biden orbit and to the leftist legal activist world that favors court-packing. Co-chair Bob Bauer was Obama’s White House counsel and is married to Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn, a highly partisan warrior. Co-chair Cristina Rodriguez was deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama Department of Justice.
The rest of the commission, despite featuring a few respected conservative scholars, also leans heavily leftward.
The Supreme Court has remained at its current size of nine members since the end of the Civil War, and for good reason. Adding members to it automatically benefits the president then in power, who can create a large partisan imbalance on the court to rubber-stamp his immediate political desires. Such a brazen power grab is so contrary to the American tradition that not even Roosevelt got away with it after riding high following a 523-8 electoral vote landslide….
[The full column is here.]
