I admit that I have never been inclined to take seriously the threat by a few voices on the Left to add seats to the Supreme Court in order to pack the Court with leftist justices.
Joe Biden prudently declined to embrace the proposal in his presidential campaign, and he might well have lost if he had. When the bill to add four justices to the Court was introduced in the House in April, Nancy Pelosi rejected it, stating that she had “no intention to bring it to the floor.” Months later, only 43 of the 221 Democrats in the House have signed onto the bill. The situation is arguably even worse in the Senate, where the bill has only two co-sponsors. As the New Republic article titled “The Democrats’ Court-Packing Plan Doesn’t Make Any Sense” explains, beyond having no chance of passage, the bill “wouldn’t even fix the problems that its supporters decry” and “doesn’t even make tactical sense.”
President Biden’s commission on Supreme Court reforms has now issued its final report, in which it limits itself to summarizing arguments for and against the Court-packing proposal and notes the existence of “profound disagreement” among its members. (See pp. 74-84.) Not surprisingly, notwithstanding the heavily portside composition of the commission, there is nothing in its summary that would ignite enthusiasm for the idea.
I’ll add that there is no reason to think that the Court’s overturning of Roe in Dobbs would resurrect the Court-packing corpse. Let’s pass over the fact that any fairminded observer should recognize that overturning Roe is legally justified. If Democrats want to override such a ruling in Dobbs, the far more direct and (for their supporters) appealing way to do so would be by enacting something like the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act, which would purport to create a very broad federal statutory right to abortion and which has already passed the House. I doubt very much whether that bill would pass the Senate, but the relevant point is that it’s difficult to imagine any scenario in which Court-packing legislation would be remotely as likely to be enacted.
In addition, having argued that Court-packing is necessary to counter the supposed threat that the Court poses to democracy, the Left would find it rather awkward to make the contradictory argument that the Court’s restoration of abortion policy to the democratic processes justifies Court-packing as a response.
One possible effect of the Court-packing threat—and, I suspect, an aim of some of its proponents—was to intimidate some justices into thinking that the bluff was real. No one should any longer be under that illusion.