Left-wing Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer recently warned against leftists’ calls to pack the Court and before her death, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also voiced opposition to it.
In an address on April 6, Breyer said he aimed to “make those whose initial instincts may favor important structural or other similar institutional changes, such as forms of ‘court-packing,’ think long and hard before embodying those changes in law,” according to Breitbart News.
The implications would be immense and undermine citizens’ confidence in the courts and “in the rule of law itself,” the 82-year-old explained.
“If the public sees judges as ‘politicians in robes,’ its confidence in the courts, and in the rule of law itself, can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power, including its power to act as a ‘check’ on the other branches,” he noted.
Video of an interview with NPR showed the late Justice Ginsburg denouncing the Democrats’ efforts to stack the Court, Breitbart News reported in September.
When asked about the number of justices, she said, “There is no fixed number in the Constitution. So this court has had as few as five, as many as ten. Nine seems to be a good number, and it’s been that way for a long time.”
“I have heard there are some on the Democrat side who would like to increase the number of judges,” she added, and mentioned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted to stack the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), making clear she believed “it was a bad idea.”
In regard to the court appearing partisan, Ginsburg said, “If anything would make the court appear partisan, it would be…one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, it was only to enlarge the number of justices so we would have more people vote the way we wanted them to.'”
At a press conference Thursday, Democrats admitted their radical legislation to stack the Supreme Court is for political reasons.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) claimed legislation to pack the Court is necessary because Republicans “broke” it through legitimate appointments.
“Our democracy is in jeopardy today because the Supreme Court standing is sorely damaged. The way we repair it is straightforward,” Markey stated.
“We can undo the damage that the Republicans have done by restoring balance. And we do it by adding four seats to the Court to create a 13-member Supreme Court,” he continued.
However, during an interview Thursday on Fox News Channel’s America’s Newsroom, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) called the court-packing bill “a way to try to intimidate the justices into the Democrats’ favored rulings.”
“One reason that we respect the rule of law is that our Constitution created an independent judiciary to protect the rights of Americans and to create a final tribunal. And that tribunal makes its decisions in accordance with the law and the statutes and previous cases,” he concluded.