On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) responded to arguments that President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court proposal is simply Democrats trying to change the court because they don’t like its rulings by stating that Republicans decided “we are going to game the system. We are going to appoint justices.” And this reform will help make the court be “seen as more fair and more promoting of our values.” As opposed to the “partisan” rulings that people see as “out of step” that she doesn’t agree with.
Washington Post columnist and MSNBC Analyst Eugene Robinson brought up the push among some white southerners to impeach then-Chief Justice Earl Warren after Brown v. Board of Education and asked, “And so, how do you respond to people who would say that, look, this is just the mirror image of that? This is progressives upset with a very conservative court that is making decisions that people like you and I might not like, but the way to change that is to go through the process, and, over time, change the composition of the court, as conservatives did all too successfully, and then you can get some of this reversed? How do you respond to that?”
Sherrill answered, “I think this is very different. I think you’re talking about two separate and important issues here. One of them really goes to the ethical lapses on the court, which is very different from what you’re discussing, right? … And then you’re also talking about this sense that you can somehow get your partisan will before the court, you can make up a court that is going to enact your partisan will, not enact the law or not find cases according to the law of the land, but rather according to the political beliefs they hold, and that’s also a problem, which is why this ethical reform and this judicial reform gets to the heart of how are we appointing justices. We’ve seen Republicans, to your point, game the system, looking at a court they didn’t like and decisions they didn’t like, and deciding, okay, we are going to game the system. We are going to appoint justices. We are going to get them on the bench despite whatever testimony they have before the Senate as they get appointed, we are going to build a bench that’s going to overturn Roe, and we are going to do it sometimes, when, for example, we have a Democratic president, we’re going to — which McConnell did — we’re going to say he can’t appoint a justice. We’re going to wait until the next president so we can hopefully build that bench we like. And this type of reform corrects that, as well, by saying, okay, we’re just going to have each president appoint two justices. We’re just going to have term limits so that they’re rotating so that nobody can game the system like that, that we can have a more fair process and hopefully a less partisan court.”
She continued, “Because I’m old enough to remember after 9/11, when it was very, very difficult to speak out against torture and rendition and Guantanamo and if you did, people would suggest you were somehow anti-American or not fighting the fight hard enough and well enough. And yet, it was our Supreme Court that actually was the one body of our government that really was able to make some changes, to have decisions that were seen by, I think, the American people, and withstood until today, as seen as more fair and more promoting of our values. And that’s a court that we don’t recognize right now.”
Earlier, Sherrill cited court rulings striking down gun control laws, overturning Roe, and their ruling on presidential immunity as “partisan” that cause people to see the court as “out of step.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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