Momentum For Court Reform Grows, From Court Expansion To Term Limits To Transparency Fixes
April 16, 2021
UNLIKELY ODDS
|Yesterday, a group of Democrats introduced legislation to expand the Supreme Court by adding four more seats. Kevin Freking with AP writes the bill was “designed to counter the court’s rightward shift.” But already its fate doesn’t seem promising. “HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI, D-Calif., said she might not bring it up for a vote if it advanced out of committee and Democratic SEN. DICK DURBIN of Illinois, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was noncommittal as well.”
LOSING FAITH
|“The bill to expand the size of the Supreme Court is hardly a surprise, given that it’s the only mechanism to change the court’s composition without a constitutional amendment. Congress has changed the number of justices seven times in the course of U.S. history, but the last time was immediately after the Civil War.” That’s Krishnadev Calamur and Nina Totenberg with NPR reporting on the Democratic court expansion plan. SENATOR ED MARKEY — one of the bill’s co-sponsors — said at a press conference yesterday in front of SCOTUS, “Too many Americans view our highest court in the land as a partisan, political institution, not our impartial, judicial branch of government. Too many Americans have lost faith in the court as a neutral arbiter of the most important constitutional and legal questions that arise in our judicial system, and I’m disappointed to say too many Americans question the court’s legitimacy.”
WITH APOLOGIES TO WILLIAM FAULKNER
|Chris Cillizza with CNN writes, “One of the most common mistakes in Washington is to confuse movement with action. That’s exactly what’s happening these days when it comes to the debate over whether the Supreme Court should be expanded.” Here to settle any concerns that 2021 might be the year SCOTUS grows in size, he offers all the reasons why what’s happening in Washington is nothing but “sound and fury not signifying all that much.”
PICK YOUR POISON
|“Democrats’ bill to expand the U.S. Supreme Court may be all but dead on arrival in Congress—but lawmakers have their eyes on a number of other pieces of legislation touching the federal courts.” Jacqueline Thomsen with The National Law Journal reports court-packing isn’t the only Supreme Court fix drawing interest from Congress. Democrats in the House have held a series of hearings on judicial issues ranging from the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” to judicial diversity. And then of course there’s always ending life tenure for justices — something the nonpartisan group Fix the Court has been a leading advocate for. Its Executive Director, GABE ROTH, said in a statement this week, “Fix the Court has long championed term limits as the way to remedy much of what’s wrong at the Supreme Court, and we’re not alone in thinking this, as large majorities of Democrats and Republicans support fixed terms over court expansion. Still, I welcome members of Congress asserting their Article I power and proposing structural changes, and it’s my belief that the more court reforms are considered, the more term limits will emerge as the proposal that can bring people together and set the court on a path to renewed legitimacy.”
TOP-ED
|Steve Vladeck takes on the issue of the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” in a new op-ed in The New York Times. He reviews the justices’ blocking California’s restriction on in-home gatherings to slow the spread of COVID-19. But whatever one may think of the outcome of that dispute, he argues “a far more glaring problem with the court’s decision is that it wasn’t an appropriate moment to reach it.” Vladeck: “Like so many of the justices’ more controversial rulings in the last few years, this one came on the court’s ‘shadow docket,’ and in a context in which the Supreme Court’s own rules supposedly limit relief to cases in which the law is ‘indisputably clear.’ Whatever else might be said about it, this case, Tandon v. Newsom, didn’t meet that standard. Instead, the justices upended their own First Amendment jurisprudence in the religion sphere, making new law in a way their precedents at least used to say they couldn’t.”