Sen. Tom Cotton: Court Packing Turns SCOTUS Into 'Super Legislature'

Sen. Tom Cotton told Breitbart News on Friday that the U.S. Supreme Court would become a “super legislature” resembling the “House of Lords” if Democrats expand the number of justices, as they have proposed.

“[Court packing] turns the Supreme Court into nothing more than just a super legislature,” said Cotton on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

He added, “It becomes like a smaller version of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom that can be manipulated by whatever transient majority holds the Congress today for political gain, forever undermining the rule of law and the reverence and veneration that the American people have for the rule of law and the Constitution.”

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Democrats’ push for court packing is motivated by a desire to create a “rubber stamp” judiciary to defend the party’s policies from constitutional challenges, Cotton noted.

“[Joe Biden] proposed a commission to study expanding the Supreme Court,” he remarked. “There’s nothing to study; the Supreme Court works just fine. The only time you add judges to a court is when its workload is overloaded. It’s obviously not overloaded. It decides like 75 or 80 cases a year. The Democrats are not worried about the effective functioning of the Supreme Court. The Democrats are worried about a Supreme Court that upholds the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Cotton recalled his questioning of Kristen Clarke, President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. He noted her previous support for Democrat and left-wing “defund the police” campaigns.

In 2020, Clarke wrote an op-ed entitled, “I Prosecuted Police Killings. Defund the Police—But Be Strategic.”

Cotton held that Clarke, if confirmed, will advance further centralization of control over state and local policing within Washington, D.C.

“[Clarke] is lying about her true positions as expressed in that article — and many times elsewhere because — she needs the votes of all 50 Democrats to get this job,” Cotton stated. “Once she gets this job as the head of the Civil Rights Division, she will come down like a ton of bricks with the full weight of the federal government on every police department in America.”

Cotton concluded, “Anytime there’s an officer-involved use of force — to include a shooting that results in death — Kristen Clarke immediately jumps to conclusions, condemns the police, condemns law enforcement as an institution — as systematically racist — irrespective of the facts.”