If the Republicans lose the Senate. It's over! The dems will pack the Supreme Court. Add d.c. and Puerto Rico as states. Make it impossible for a Republican to win again
It’s true that Congress can shape the size of the court to its political desires.
In 1866, when Congress was at war with President Andrew Johnson, it passed the Judicial Circuits Act, which cut the size of the court from nine to seven, and barred Johnson from appointing any new justices.
But after Ulysses Grant was elected president in 1868, the number was bumped back up to nine, where it has remained ever since.
In other words, if the Democrats pack the Court, the next time the Republicans win they will also add more judges in their favor and it now becomes a tit for tat war.
We have the example of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1937 who had to deal with the court that was striking down his New Deal legislation. After his landslide reelection he proposed to add one justice for every judge who’d reached the age of 70, up to a total of 15.
Despite his popularity, and the overwhelming control of Congress by Democrats, the proposal became the first political defeat of FDR’s presidency—and came at the hands of his own party. His own vice president, John Garner, fought it.
The proposal died in Congress before a vote was taken.”
Today, one of the more significant institutional voices against expanding the court is, believe it or not … Joe Biden.
In July 2019, Biden said “we’ll live to rue that day” if the court was expanded. In a debate, he said it would lead to round after round of expansion and the court would “lose all credibility.” Senator Bernie Sanders, no stranger to radical ideas, has also said he doesn’t want to pack the court.
But that was before RBG’s seat.
There are several alternatives that have been debated in legal and academic circles:
They range from giving each political party five justices, who would then choose five more; to limiting the terms of judges so that every president gets two picks; to making all 180 federal appeals court judges members of the court, with panels of nine chosen at random to rule on all matters, including which cases the court would take up.
This change would require only legislation; proposals for limiting the terms of justices would require amending the Constitution.
They all have the quality of careful thought and the nonexistent possibility that any of them becomes reality in the midst of a full-blown constitutional brawl. And if Congress pushes through a restructuring of the court on a strictly partisan vote, giving Americans a Supreme Court that looks unlike anything they grew up with, and unlike the institution we’ve had for more than 240 years, it’s hard to imagine the country as a whole would see its decisions as legitimate.
There’s a good reason that more than 80 years ago, in a time of turmoil, a Democratic president at the peak of his political power nonetheless found his plans thwarted by members of his own party, who found the cost of tinkering with constitutional machinery too high a price to pay.
Keep in mind also that the U.S. Supreme Court’s job is to “INTERPRET THE LAW, - NOT ENFORCE IT.
It’s powers are limited also.
A Good example of this is that should a conservative Supreme Court majority overturn Roe v. Wade,---- access to abortion won’t end; it will instead depend on which State you live in.
This is based on the The Tenth Amendment's simple language—“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people
Quote; Joan Williams recently noted, thanks to Republican efforts at the state level over the past years, access to reproductive services “already depends on where you live.” Even with Roe v. Wade in place, there is “no abortion clinic in 90 percent of American counties.”
The fight over abortion has been going on at the State level for quite a while, even though the Supreme Court already interpreted the law and ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.
Again the Checks and
Balances limit the Power that the Supreme Court has.The Court does not have the power to enforce the law and cannot force any State to abide by it's Interpretation.