Why We Should ALL Fear a Packed Court
By: Aj Writes Things
Tags: Trump, Biden, SCOTUS, Justice, Politics

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Democratic nominee Joe Biden evaded questions as to whether or not he intended to pack the Supreme Court. He was pressed multiple times and failed to divulge his position to voters until “after the election”, to quote directly from the big guy himself. So what exactly does it mean to “pack the court”? What sort of impact could this have on the country, and on our democratic processes? Spoiler alert, if you’re a fan of American democracy, it ain’t pretty.

This court packing nonsense began when historically liberal Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, bit the big one, and sent the Left into a legit, frothing, seizing frenzy. If you haven’t seen the TikTok video that @Distelthirst made of herself screaming in her car when RGB died, stop reading this and go watch it. I’m sorry. But this vid sort of illustrates the kind of um… I’ll say impassioned, enthusiasm with which the Left seems to pursue judicial, legislative and executive leverage over the rest of us. I could digress into an entire Freudian diatribe about the Left’s disturbing propensity toward screaming unintelligibly when things don’t go their way, but for now lets just unpack “court packing”.

(Leftist pigeon responds to RBG death) Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash

To pack the court, means to expand the number of justices that sit on the Supreme Court. When RBG died she left a vacancy on the court, which was the president’s job to fill. As you know, the vacancy was filled by Trump’s conservative nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. This means that the already majority conservative court is now a heavily conservative court. The Left’s plan to resolve this? Pack the court, of course.

Packing the court would essentially shift the balance of power to whatever conservative to liberal ratio best serves the sitting president. The problem with this is that it effectively nullifies the separation of powers by subjugating the judiciary to the will of the Executive Branch, meaning the three branches of government would essentially become two: the Judicio-executive, and the Legislative. So, SCOTUS not ruling your way? No problem. Change the conservative to liberal ratio and presto, you get your way. No tantrums or sky-screaming necessary.

This entire issue can basically be boiled down to control. History is replete with stories that illustrate the human desire for control. And everyone in those stories (and in real life) thinks/thought the same thing: “We want control because we know how to run things justly”. Yes, everyone who ever wielded a scepter or sat beneath a crown, with maybe the exception of Louis XVI, believed they were definitely the ones who could do it right. Immediately blossoming from that belief came the now familiar cycle of rising and falling empires, kingships, countries and countrymen, papacies, dynasties great and small, short and long, you name it we’ve seen it. Of those, all but two failed the greater extent of history in providing prolonged periods of internal peace and prosperity. Those are of course the Nerva-Antonine dynasty of ancient Rome, and the United States of America.

Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

We in the United States were bestowed with the system, a Republic, designed to defend all of us from the control of men. That is the entire point of the thing. The Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, the Constitution, the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, all of it was to free us from the control of those who would seek it. To that end, we have devised a complex system of checks and balances built for the express purpose of dividing control. Any president who would seek to circumvent the constitutional safeguards against a concentration of power should by all rational people be perceived as an enemy of the people.

(Mao, or as my cat says, “Mow”) Photo by Kirill Sharkovski on Unsplash

Since election day, Biden has been conspicuously absent from public sphere. He has yet to give any inkling about his intention to pack the court or not to. This may simply be an attempt to appease Democrats on either side of the issue, letting both hard-core leftists who would demand a packed court, and those moderate Democrats who more or less understand the value of the separation of powers, believe whatever they want, instead of disappointing a particular side. Or, it could mean he intends to pack the court so he can have his way but won’t say that’s what he intends until he’s made it into the White House. Either way, his decision not to firmly denounce the idea says enough about his character that those of us who didn’t vote for him can sleep soundly on inauguration day knowing that whatever tyrannical policies roll down from Pennsylvania Avenue under comrade Biden, we can’t be blamed; we voted for the other guy.