Let’s start with a definition, as a curious number of politicians on the left are now pretending the phrase “court packing” refers to a president filling a vacant seat in an election year.
Dictionary.com puts it this way: “court packing: an unsuccessful attempt by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 to appoint up to six additional justices to the Supreme Court, which had invalidated a number of his New Deal laws.”
“Court packing” is clearly about increasing the number of U.S Supreme Court justices in an attempt to advance a particular political agenda. And that is what is being threatened.
With the confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett—President Trump’s nominee to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court that opened with the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg--now under way in the U.S. Senate, some on the left have been calling for Joe Biden, if he does win the presidency, to do what FDR couldn’t. They want him to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with four or more new, and likely anti-Second Amendment, justices.
This way, even if Judge Barrett becomes Justice Barrett, her stated belief that a judge should not legislate from the bench would be nullified should Biden pack the court with jurists who feel the opposite. This would turn the U.S. Supreme Court into a super legislature of men and women with lifetime appointments.
A Biden court-packing scheme would be an America-altering progressive power grab. A power grab that Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), won’t tell us whether they’d do or not.
At the vice-presidential debate, Vice President Mike Pence asked Harris if her administration would attempt to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.
Pence asked, “If Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States, are you and Joe Biden, if somehow you win this election, going to pack the Supreme Court to get your way?”
Harris refused to answer, and Pence asked, “People are voting right now. They’d like to know if you and Joe Biden are gonna pack the Supreme Court if you don’t get your way in this nomination.”
After repeated dodges from Harris, Pence said, “I just want the record to reflect, she never answered the question. Perhaps at the next debate Joe Biden will answer the question. And I think the American people know the answer.”
Although Harris evaded revealing her position during the debate, her apparent intentions were reported by Alexander Burns, a reporter for The New York Times. Burns says Harris told him she was interested in packing the U.S. Supreme Court. Burns said, “Senator Harris told me in an interview actually that she was absolutely open to doing that….”
Americans who cherish their Second Amendment rights should be particularly worried, as the two landmark Second Amendment U.S. Supreme Court decisions, District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010), were decided on 5-4 votes. Anyone who reads the minority opinions in those cases will see that the justices on the left were then, as they are now, not giving an inch with their unhistorical insistence that the Second Amendment doesn’t mean what it says.
As NRA-ILA reports: “Even with a majority of justices that recognize the proper individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, the narrow majority has proven reluctant to vindicate this right when presented with the opportunity.”
It’s also no secret that both Biden and Harris don’t think, despite all the historical evidence, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. If they are given the opportunity to pack the court, they are clearly not going to nominate justices who believe you have this individual right.
At a September 2019 “townhall” event, Biden was asked, “Do you agree with the D.C. v. Heller decision in regards to protecting the individual right to bear arms that are in common use and which are utilized for lawful purposes?”
Biden said, “If I were on the court I wouldn’t have made the same ruling. OK, that’s number one.”
Meanwhile, when she was District Attorney of San Francisco, Harris signed an amicus curiae brief in Heller that argued the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right to keep and bear arms.
If the Biden-Harris ticket prevails in November, and their party also wins majority control of the U.S. Senate, a Biden-Harris administration could quickly pack the U.S. Supreme Court with justices who are opposed to your freedom. Such a court could then accept Second Amendment-related cases and reverse the holdings in Heller and McDonald, either in part or completely. The most extreme forms of gun control, including outright bans on handguns and other common self-defense firearms, would undoubtedly take root in anti-gun states and cities across the country. Before long, America wouldn’t be America any longer.
