Court Packing

For John, BLUF:  Court Packing was a thing in the late 1930s, when President Franklin D Roosevelt felt that he was losing momentum in his efforts to lead the United States out of the Great Depression.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Turley:  Supreme Court May Be Sending a Stealth Message to Democrats

From PJ Media, by Mr Matt Margolis, 1 June 2021, 12:00 PM ET.

Here is the lede plus four:

Legal analyst Jonathan Turley thinks the United States Supreme Court is sending a message to the Democrats about their not-so-secret plans to pack the court—and I think his theory has merit.

Turley believes that four recent unanimous decisions by the Court are a message to the Democratic majority that the Supreme Court is “not so rigidly ideological as Democratic members and activists suggest.”

In the Garland case, the court ruled (again) unanimously to reverse the Ninth Circuit in an opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch on the rule in immigration disputes regarding the credibility of noncitizens’ testimony.  cannot be reconciled with the terms of the Immigration and Nationality Act.  In Cooley, the Court unanimously ruled in an opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer that a tribal police officer has authority to detain temporarily and to search a non-Native American traveling on a public right-of-way running through a reservation.

Last week, there were two unanimous opinions making this six 9-0 rulings in two weeks.  Justice Sotomayor wrote the opinion in United States v. Palomar-Santiago, an immigration decision that ruled for the government and against an immigrant.  It also ruled unanimously in Territory of Guam v. United States, in an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas.  The Court ruled in favor of Guam on the collection of funding from the U.S. government to remediate environmental pollution on the island.

Turley also notes that a number of current and former justices, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have publicly warned against packing the court.  “If anything would make the court look partisan, it would be that—one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to,’” RBG said shortly before she died.

A resort to court packing is a sign that we don't have a concensus on how to go forward politically.  It says that one or more parties has lost faith in the eventual proper outcome on issues.

Court packing is a sign of tough times and an unwillingnesss to try and compromise as we all go forward.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff