Mondaire Jones is Running for Congress north of NYC. He has a few credentials, like degrees from Stanford and Harvard Law School. Today, he takes up a favorite topic of mine: If the Dems win POTUS and the Senate, they should expand SCOTUS. He isn’t alone on this—Lawrence Tribe has supported doing this, at times—I hate calling it “packing the court,” but it’s the same process.
His case is pretty simply that the progressive opponents of this are missing a key point: They fear that expanding SCOTUS would cause a “death spiral” for Democracy, but as shown recently in Wisconsin, that is already happening. The only way to FIX that death spiral is to make the current cheaters on the Court a minority.
www.salon.com/...
To save our democracy, we must expand the Supreme Court
Critics say such a move might cause a "death spiral" of democracy. Well, guess what? That's already here
Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court interfered in an election in Wisconsin in yet another 5-4 decision meant to secure an electoral advantage for the Republican Party. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, a federal district court had granted a one-week extension to Wisconsin's mail-in ballot deadline. The election included not only Wisconsin's presidential primary, but also a crucial judicial general election that threatened the GOP's hold on the state's highest court. But the Supreme Court overruled the lower court, tossing out thousands of absentee ballots and forcing Wisconsin voters and poll workers to risk exposure to coronavirus. The irony: the justices made their votes in the case remotely.
The Court reasoned that lower federal courts "should not ordinarily alter the election rules on the eve of an election." This ignored, of course, that a pandemic made the election in question anything but ordinary. Milwaukee, a city of 600,000 people, ordinarily has 180 polling places, but there were just five open on Election Day. Madison, a city of 255,000 people, ordinarily does not experience half of its poll workers missing, as it did that Tuesday. (It was surely not lost on the Court's conservative majority that these cities ordinarily vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.) And, of course, Wisconsinites do not ordinarily have to choose between risking viral infection or staying home and forgoing their sacred right to vote.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court's hostility towards democracy has become ordinary. Our democracy has been under assault for the past two decades, and the Supreme Court has dealt many of the sharpest blows. Since 2000, the court has ordered the state of Florida to stop counting ballots and handed the presidential election to a Republican who lost the popular vote, gutted the Voting Rights Act, upheld racist voter ID laws in Indiana, allowed a torrent of dark money to flow into our electoral process, and authorized racially biased voter purges in Ohio.
It is time we do something about the Roberts court's assault on democracy. Expanding the Supreme Court is our only option.
As he notes, we cannot restore democracy if we don’t have an honest majority in SCOTUS.
Democrats have a bold plan to restore democracy, but it may not pass muster with a hostile Supreme Court...
Make no mistake, Democrats want to compete for the support of the American people. Unfortunately, Republicans have shown that their strategy for winning is to cheat. Very recently, President Trump admitted that when more people vote, Republicans lose.
So if they need to cheat to win, how about restructuring a SCOTUS that helps them cheat, so it can’t help them cheat?
So, imo, the arguments here are compelling, and the risks are pretty small. What happens if the Rethugs win back power? Well, based upon their weakness when they can’t cheat, scar tissue from Trump, and Dem’s massive demographic advantages, the risks of Rethugs taking back an HONEST majority aren’t all that good any time soon. And if we can vastly expand mail-in voting by 2022, the odds of the Rethugs winning back anything get even smaller—blocking mail-in voting is part of the cheat. So are the SCOTUS rulings on voting rights.
From Paul Walman at WaPo back in 2019:
But the mere fact that Democratic presidential candidates are even talking about this shows that the party — not everyone in it, but a healthy portion of its members and elected representatives — is simply fed up with getting walked all over for being noble. As I’ve said before, when it came to exploiting loopholes, stomping all over norms and fighting dirty, for some time Republicans have been the party of “Yes we can” while Democrats have been the party of “Maybe we shouldn’t.” But that may be changing.
My point in the Waldman quote is that with all of the awfulness in both the Rethug party and SCOTUS (including a real risk of damaging or blowing up Roe), the political risks associated with making this change were already weakening last year. This year, amid Wisconsin inner city voters dying from COVID-19 directly because of SCOTUS, risks to Roe and risks to the ACA, the time make the case for restructuring the court may well be here—or very likely it WILL be here if we get the Blue Tsunami I believe we will get. The time for needed but radical changes is right after a tsunami. So, let’s hope we can get one, which I think we will, and then prepare for the restructuring on day 1 of the new Senate, when these kinds of things are easiest.
Now, I realize that Biden may not be emotionally or politically prepared for this. It will take massive noise from progressives, to even make this a part of the conversation. But, let’s try, especially given the risks of losing Roe and the ACA to SCOTUS. For a long time, justices at least noticed if the direction of wind change was getting pronounced and fierce. This bunch doesn’t give a rat’s ass. We need to fix that.