That’s the current reality: The Supreme Court is already packed. As such, the law professors hoped to “generate more careful reflection on the incentives to courtpack and the potential consequences of it.” Without Congress taking action, “the best estimate of the next time the Supreme Court is expected to have a majority of Democratic-leaning justices is in 2065.”
What that means in the real world: People now in their 40s and older might not see a Democratic court majority in their lifetime. An 18-year-old registering to vote for their first presidential election next year will have to wait until they’re middle-aged to see the court’s ideology switch.
The authors take a theoretical look at the past, and it hurts:
If we adjust our starting assumptions to reflect a world where either Justice Ginsburg retired before 2015, Merrick Garland was confirmed in 2016, or Justice Amy Comey Barrett was not confirmed in 2020, the median outcome is that Democratic-leaning justices would comprise a majority on the Supreme Court for the first time in 2029 and they would control a majority of the Court for about half of the next century.
If Democrats had played the same kind of hardball Republicans have played, we’d be in a different world. After Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, Republicans broke every norm completely blocking President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. They argued it was too close—eight months—to the next presidential election to allow an appointment. Then they cravenly reversed themselves to cram Justice Amy Coney Barrett onto the court just days before the 2020 election.
Democrats might have prevented Barrett if they had convinced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire while it was safe, though that’s a more theoretical supposition. Republicans led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell probably would have found a way, even in 2015, to block an Obama appointment, because thwarting Obama was McConnell’s reason for being. In a way, though, that proves the point: Republicans have been playing Democrats for chumps for decades on the Supreme Court, and it has spelled disaster for democracy.
This Republican-dominated Supreme Court has now declared war on every single achievement secured in the modern era: civil rights, voting rights, reproductive rights, clean drinking water, clean air—you name it. If it’s progress, they’ll figure out how to stop it. That’s precisely what they will keep doing for the next 50 years unless this is fixed.
The Supreme Court has already been packed. Court expansion is not the only way to fix that, but it’s among the best, and is definitely the quickest way to do court reform. The primary argument Democrats make against it is that it will only result in tit for tat, and Republicans would retaliate by adding more seats, and it would keep going that way. Democrats arguing that are missing the larger point. Republicans don’t need an excuse to go to extremes—they do it because that’s who they are. The only way to fight that is with fire.
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Dimitri of WarTranslated has been doing the essential work of translating hours of Russian and Ukrainian video and audio during the invasion of Ukraine. He joins Markos and Kerry from London to talk about how he began this work by sifting through various sources. He is one of the only people translating information for English-speaking audiences. Dimitri’s followed the war since the beginning and has watched the evolution of the language and dispatches as the war has progressed.
