Quinta Jurecic and Susan Hennessey of Lawfare argue, in The Atlantic, that “The Reckless Race to Confirm Amy Coney Barrett Justifies Court Packing.” The article aims at a more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone, which it announces without subtlety: “We have now come to believe, more in sorrow than in anger, that adding justices may be the only way to restore the institutional legitimacy of the Court.” It is, however, an incoherent soup of Democratic talking points to justify what Democratic partisans want to do.
Jurecic and Hennessey persistently stack the deck by omitting or whitewashing just about everything that runs against their argument. “For the past few years, court packing has largely been a fringe idea, promulgated by leftist scholars and activists” — well, if you ignore Pete Buttigieg (who used the idea to vault from nowhere into national prominence), Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Kamala Harris, all of whom were warm to the idea a year ago. As you may have heard, Harris is on the national ticket. Some fringe.
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