Professor Warren speaks about mortgage loan disclosures. Photo courtesy of CFPB December 6, 2010.
Earlier this year Joe Biden set up a special commission to examine expanding the Supreme Court’s membership in order to pack it with hardcore liberal justices to overcome what has become a majority of Republican-appointed justices on the bench.
The commission was packed full of sympathetic Ivy League lawyers and legal scholars, including the rabidly anti-Trump Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, but it still came to the decision that it was probably not a great idea to pack the court. The draft report by the commission stated “The risks of court expansion are considerable, including that it could undermine the very goal of some of its proponents of restoring the court’s legitimacy.”
Despite that conclusion, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has furiously demanded that the court be expanded by four or more seats. Even going so far as to say that two seats were “stolen” by the Trump administration. The Daily Mail reports:
Elizabeth Warren has said ‘it’s time’ to start packing the Supreme Court, claiming that the current set of judges ‘threaten the democratic foundations of our nation.’
The progressive Senator claimed the ‘radical court’ had ‘trampled on the Constitution’ and urged Congress to restore ‘balance and integrity to the broken institution’ ahead of forthcoming decisions on abortion and gun control.
Warren, 72, writes in the Boston Globe: ‘I don’t come to this conclusion lightly or because I disagree with a particular decision; I come to this conclusion because I believe the current court threatens the democratic foundations of our nation.’
She said she supported expanding the high court by at least four seats and urged Congress to act after the ‘extremist’ justices upheld the ‘racist Muslim ban’ and ‘threatened to eliminate Roe v. Wade.’
‘This radical court has reversed century-old campaign-finance restrictions, opening the floodgates for corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to buy our elections. It has reversed well-settled law that once required employers to permit union organizers to meet with worker,’ she writes.
‘It has trampled on the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection by upholding a racist Muslim ban. It has twisted the law to deny Americans their right to a day in court, despite the clear intent of Congress. And it has gutted one of the most important civil rights laws of our time, the Voting Rights Act, not once but twice,’ Warren continued.
The Massachusetts Senator said that given the court’s track record, it was incumbent on Congress to intervene – as it has the right to do as set out by the Constitution.
‘This court’s lawlessness is a powerful threat to our democracy and our country,’ Warren wrote.
‘Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the authority to change the size of the Supreme Court. Congress has used that authority seven times before. To restore balance and integrity to a broken institution, Congress must expand the Supreme Court by four or more seats,’ she added.
While acknowledging concerns over court packing, she claimed that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump used ‘two stolen seats’ to push through their own nominations.
The ‘stolen seats’ refers to Merrick Garland, whose nomination by Barack Obama was blocked by Republicans who said it came too close to the election, and the seat left vacant by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who was replaced shortly before the 2020 vote.
Trump nominated Justice Neil Gorsuch for the seat Garland would have taken, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett for Ginsburg’s spot on the Supreme Court.
