Though he may sound somewhat moderate in comparison to Sotomayor and Kagan, Justice Stephen Breyer is one of the most left-wing justices on the Supreme Court. Yet, in an address to Harvard Law School on Tuesday, even he is now warning Joe Biden that his plans to pack the Supreme Court are extremely ill-advised, unless his goal is to damage the fabric of America indefinitely by destroying “the rule of law itself.”
“Breyer delivered the remarks on Tuesday in an address in which he said he aimed to “make those whose initial instincts may favor important structural or other similar institutional changes, such as forms of ‘court-packing,’ think long and hard before embodying those changes in law.”
The implications, the 82-year-old justice said, would be great and undermine the American people’s confidence in the courts and “in the rule of law itself.”
“If the public sees judges as ‘politicians in robes,’ its confidence in the courts, and in the rule of law itself, can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power, including its power to act as a ‘check’ on the other branches,” Breyer explained.”
Breyer also addressed the false notion that the supreme court is somehow conservative. Trump supporters once erroneously believed this as well until the 2020 election proved them completely wrong. Nearly all of the justices stabbed the Constitution in the back, refusing to even hear any of the dozens of cases regarding the alleged massive fraud that took place in the 2020 election.
“…The court’s decision in the 2000 presidential election case, Bush v. Gore, is often referred to as an example of its favoritism of conservative causes,” Breyer explained. “But the court did not hear or decide cases that affected the political disagreements arising out of the 2020 Trump v. Biden election.”
As Breitbart News reported, Justice Clarence Thomas and other conservative justices voted to hear these cases, excoriating his colleagues like Breyer for refusing to consider the legal arguments they presented.
“It did uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare, the health care program favored by liberals,” he continued, referring to a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court in 2012, during a time when few people would have said the Court had a conservative majority at all.
“It did re-affirm precedents that favored a woman’s right to an abortion. It did find unlawful certain immigration, census, and other orders, rules, or regulations, favored by a conservative president,” he said.
Because of the nature of these rulings, favoring the political left at times and right at others, Breyer said it convinces him that “it is wrong to think of the court as another political institution.”
Ultimately, he said the court’s authority is built on “a trust that the court is guided by legal principle, not politics.”
“Structural alteration motivated by the perception of political influence can only feed that perception, further eroding that trust,” he added.
…Notably, the late-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also rejected the notion of court-packing. “It would make the Court look partisan,” Ginsburg told National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg in 2019.
Democrats tried court-packing once before, when President Franklin Roosevelt pushed legislation expanding the Court to 15 justices. The idea was wildly unpopular, leading to enough congressional Democrats siding with Republicans to defeat the power grab, and Democrats paid a very steep price in the 1938 midterm elections.
But a couple of justices on the Supreme Court at the time misread the politics of the situation, switching their votes in 1937 from previous cases on key constitutional limits on the federal government, opening the door to massive expansions of federal power.
The Court has had nine justices since the Judiciary Act of 1869. Republicans are now proposing a constitutional amendment to fix that number at nine going forward.”
So, the question remains: will Biden’s court packing commission lead him to do so, or will he back down in a dubious attempt to appear moderate?
Perhaps the best thing we can hope for is for him to overstep his bounds so magnificently by attempting to pack the court (as as FDR did) in the hopes that it will shock the brainwashed population into awakening to his radicalism.
What do you think, readers?