During last week’s CNN town hall, Kamala Harris was asked by a voter, “Would you be in favor of expanding the Court to, say, 12?”
Harris answered, “I do believe that there should be some kind of reform of the Court, and we can study what that actually looks like.”
At any other time before Harris’ ill-fated presidential bid during the 2020 election cycle, we could have expected a clear rejection of court packing. It is, after all, the most destructive of the several harmful proposals sponsored by Senate Democrats aimed at delegitimizing the Supreme Court. To highlight a few, take a look at Senator Ron Wyden’s recently introduced bill that would, among other things, add six new justices to the Court, require yearly IRS audits of the justices, and impose supermajority voting requirements to strike down acts of Congress. Senator Ed Markey’s bill would add four new justices to the Court.
There are, of course, many ways to harass conservative justices and undermine the Court’s independence. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s ethics panel scheme, as I have explored at length, aims to subtract justices in order to reach the Left’s desired outcomes. The Biden/Harris administration has endorsed in broad terms the “ethics reform” ruse and thrown in term limits.
Harris’ position with respect to packing the Supreme Court is nothing new. She stated as a presidential candidate in 2019 that she was “open to this conversation about increasing the number of people on the United States Supreme Court.” That was during her tenure as a senator, when she had a penchant for grilling judicial nominees with demagoguery that fell flat and at times reflected her own intolerance of their religious backgrounds. Since becoming the nominee of her party, she has backtracked on her far-left track record in opposition to fracking and in favor of socialized medicine, but she has not similarly concealed what a rigid ideologue she is on the Supreme Court. She even advocates abolishing the legislative filibuster if the Democrats achieve control of the two political branches of government.
Harris rationalizes her extremism by shamelessly spouting the narrative of today’s Left that there is a legitimacy crisis on the Supreme Court. But there is no such crisis. That is a manufactured narrative pushed forward by Democrats who want to pack a Court that adheres to the Constitution instead of the Left’s policy platform. The people do not buy this narrative, but it is the premise for Harris’ radical agenda. Court packing used to be universally recognized as a fringe and dangerous idea that would destroy judicial independence. But what used to be fringe is now the Democratic Party line.