Court-packing used to be defined as “an unsuccessful attempt by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 to appoint up to six additional justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had invalidated a number of his New Deal laws.” However, Dictionarycom redefined the word sometime between Nov. 1 and Dec. 1 of 2020 adding a 2nd definition as the main definition, according to the waybackmachine: “the practice of changing the number or composition of judges on a court, making it more favorable to particular goals or ideologies, and typically involving an increase in the number of seats on the court.”
As Twitchy reported, Rep. Jim Jordan on 7 December 2020 asked in a tweet why Democrats won’t admit that they want to pack the courts. Playboy senior White House reporter Brian J. Karem replied the following day, tweeting, “Why won’t the GOP admit they DID?”
Even before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, liberals had been accusing Republicans of “packing the courts” simply by filling vacancies with conservative judges. It was a nice distraction from Joe Biden’s refusal to say if he’d consider packing the court — i.e., adding seats to the Supreme Court and appointing enough liberal judges to tip the ideological balance.
The idea of packing the Supreme Court by expanding the number of justices and filling the new positions with liberals has been floating around within the Democratic Party since Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Court, creating a new 5-4 conservative majority. In May 2019, the Boston Globe reported that then-South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who was running for president, was backing a version of that plan in which the current justices would choose the new ones.
In July 2020, Democrats circulated a platform that included D.C. statehood and hinted at statehood for Puerto Rico. Then, at the funeral for the late Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), former President Barack Obama let the cat out of the bag. He called for the filibuster to be eliminated and suggested that D.C. and Puerto Rico might be granted statehood. Then former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was revealed as the mastermind behind a “war room” to kill the filibuster called “Fix the Senate.” And Biden himself came out in September 2020 in favor of statehood for Puerto Rico — all before Ginsburg passed away on September 18, 2020.
There is nothing new about Democrats’ radical plans. Ginsburg’s passing is simply a pretext for them to pretend Republicans have forced them to adopt extreme measures. The only thing that has changed is that they might go beyond 11 judges at the Supreme Court, and extend their court-packing to the judiciary as a whole. They cynically exploited Ginsburg’s death.1
