When you don’t like the message,” the old saying goes, “shoot the messenger.”
In the wake of Supreme Court rulings they don’t like, leading Democrats in Washington renewed calls last year to “pack” the Court with more liberal justices. Were that to happen, it would surely set off “tit for tat” fights the next time a Republican sits in the White House.
Democrats control the Senate today and could conceivably muster the votes to fill a vacancy if one occurs in the next two years. But a plan spearheaded by Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) to change the Court’s composition from nine to 13 has no chance to pass both houses of Congress, at least for the moment. Boosting the number of justices for purely ideological advantage is the very definition of court-packing.
Reducing the size of a court can also be seen as a form of court packing (or “unpacking”), depending on the intent. Ten years ago, then-Congressman (now Senator) Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced the ironically named Stop Court Packing Act. It would have reduced the number of judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia from eleven to eight. Clearly meant to thwart President Obama’s nominees to the court, it went nowhere.
