Elephant and donkey painting courthouse red and blue.
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Democrat party leaders are furious about certain Supreme Court decisions, so they’re bandying around ideas to effectively destroy the third branch of government. To get their way, they’re ready, in effect, to tear up the Constitution. How? By packing the High Court when the Democrats are next in control of Congress and the White House. They would enact legislation to increase the number of justices from the current 9 to 13. That way, the 4 new, far-left justices would be able to overcome the current 6-3 conservative majority.
This would throw the Constitution’s separation of powers into the shredder. Our Founders deliberately created three co-equal branches of government—the executive, the legislative and the judicial. The Supreme Court would ensure that unconstitutional laws and executive actions would be stopped and that rights guaranteed in the Constitution, such as freedom of speech, would be preserved, even in the face of unpopularity. For example, during the Korean War, President Harry Truman ordered the federal government to seize the nation’s steel mills in the name of national security. The Supreme Court nixed the seizure.
Of course, over the years various Supreme Court rulings have been controversial. Presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump have railed against certain renderings from the High Court. President Trump is still fuming over the Supreme Court’s nullifying the tariffs he enacted by executive orders. And he will certainly let loose when the justices likely overturn his order concerning birthright citizenship.
But packing the Supreme Court would demolish an essential pillar of the Constitution’s separation of powers. A president doesn’t like a decision? Expand the size of the court with his cronies to get what he wants. That’s what third-rate, Third World countries do. Every state would have the precedent to undermine judicial independence. It’s the road to tyranny.
For decades, the Democratic party’s liberal activists saw the court system as a way to enact their agendas without having to go through the drudgery of the legislative process, especially when their notions were unpopular. But gradually this judicial activism of legislating from the bench has been tempered by adverse public opinion and the growing influence of legal scholarship that objected to this usurpation of traditional legislative powers.
In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt was angered by certain unfavorable Supreme Court rulings. When he won reelection in 1936 with the-then greatest landslide in U.S. history and was enjoying overwhelming majorities in Congress, Roosevelt proposed packing the Supreme Court with a bevy of new, compliant justices. However, Americans back then were taught civics and learned about the Constitution and the separation of powers. Despite FDR’s immense popularity, his scheme was overwhelmingly rejected.
Even though our education system has largely been derelict in teaching civics, most Americans will react negatively if the Washington politicians try to tamper with the Supreme Court.