BEWARE: Democrats Push Dangerous Lie that Republicans are ‘Packing the Court’ - Push Back!

When leftists claim that Republicans are “packing the court,” they are blatantly lying. “Packing the Court” is defined simply as adding more than nine Justices to the Supreme Court. RAIR Foundation USA presents the history of “Packing the Court”, and provides indisputable evidence that hard left democrats fully intend on expanding the number of Supreme Court Justices over nine in order to push their socialist programs such as the Green New Deal.

The lie that Republicans are engaged in court-packing is being used to deflect from Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s refusal to answer whether he intends on adding additional leftist Supreme Court Justices should he win the 2020 election.

In truth, the question of “Packing the Court” poses quite a dilemma for the Biden campaign. If Joe Biden assures Americans that he will not add leftist Justices to the Supreme Court, he will lose votes from his radical base. If he states that he will add Justices to the Supreme Court, his moderate voters will call him out. It is strategically better for him to dodge the question.

“You’ll know my position on court-packing the day after the election,” Biden declared.

Erased History

“Packing the Court” was a phrase initially used derisively to refer to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to add Justices who would help him push through his unconstitutional New Deal programs, many aspects of which were struck down by the Supreme Court at the time. The Court Packing proposal was so shocking and outrageous that FDR’s own Vice President John Nance Garner “held his nose and gave an emphatic ‘thumbs-down’ sign as the bill was introduced on the floor of the Senate”.

“Packing the Courts” was considered to be such a monstrosity that “a number of Supreme Court Justices considered resigning en masse if the plan went through.”

As stated clearly at the official Federal Judicial Center‘s website:

“Roosevelt’s motive was clear – to shape the ideological balance of the Court so that it would cease striking down his New Deal legislation. As a result, the plan was widely and vehemently criticized. The law was never enacted by Congress, and Roosevelt lost a great deal of political support for having proposed it.”

On March 9, 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt discussed his court-packing plan on one of his Fireside Chats in an attempt to reassure Americans. During his plea, he reassurred citizens that his plan was not meant to “place on the bench spineless puppets who would disregard the law and would decide specific cases as I wished them to be decided” but rather “to provide for a constant flow of new and younger blood into the Judiciary.”

Listen to his speech (full transcript here):

Joe Biden once Referred to “Packing the Courts” as a “Bonehead Idea”

During a 1983 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Biden not only referred specifically to FDR’s court-packing plan as a “terrible, terrible mistake,” he further declared that FDR’s court packing plan “put in question, for an entire decade, the independence of the most significant body…the Supreme Court of the United States of America”:

“President Roosevelt clearly had the right to send to the United States Senate and the United States Congress a proposal to pack the Court. It was totally within his right to do that—he violated no law, he was legalistically absolutely correct.”

“But it was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make, and it put in question, for an entire decade, the independence of the most significant body—including the Congress in my view—the most significant body in this country, the Supreme Court of the United States of America.”

Watch:

The recently-deceased Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed in this July 24, 2019 NPR interview, which indicates that the left was pushing to pack the court even before she passed away.

“I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court,” she said:

In the wake of Justice Ginsburg’s death, some Democrats threatened to “Pack the Courts” should President Trump nominate a Supreme Court Justice:

“Republicans are Packing the Courts” Lie

Newspapers and his own fellow Democrats denounced FDR’s court packing plan, as citizens understood and fought against government power-grabs in America’s tradition of limited government. Today, the establishment media and Democrats are onboard.

The lie that Republicans are “Packing the Court” by appointing constitutional judges and/or filling a vacant Supreme Court seat is meant to deflect from the actual definition of court packing and is picking up steam without much resistance.

Here are some of many examples of the lie:

Final Thought

It is unclear when America collectively decided that the Constitution is no longer the law of the land and that the job of the Supreme Court is not to interpret law based on the Constitution, but rather based on the partisan whims of the left. This author has always taken issue with the phrase “Originalist,” which refers to a Supreme Court Justice who interprets law based on the intent of those who devised the Constitution. All Supreme Court Justices should be “Originalists” if America still maintains that the Constitution is the law of the land.