McConnell on Court-Packing: “Responsible People Across the Political Spectrum Have a Duty to Denounce This”
U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding court-packing:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding court-packing:
“Time and time again, prominent Democrats show they’re no longer content to work within the ground rules and norms of our institutions, but prefer to threaten the institutions themselves.
“We’ve seen it in presidential elections, where Democrats say our democracy is sacrosanct when they win, but illegitimate and broken if Republicans win.
“We’ve seen it with the Senate’s rules. Democrats just spent four years praising and using the legislative filibuster. But now that they hold the majority, they say it’s actually been intrinsically evil all along and must be scrapped.
“We’re seeing it right now with voting regulations, where the mere fact that sometimes Republicans win elections has Democrats wanting to rewrite all 50 states’ election laws here in Washington and turn the F.E.C. into a partisan body.
“And then there is the judiciary.
“In recent years, we’ve seen the Democratic Leader stand on the steps of the Court and threaten that specific justices, quote, ‘won’t know what hit them’ if they didn’t rule the way he wanted.
“We’ve seen a number of Democratic Senators send a threatening brief suggesting the Court might need to be ‘restructured’ if its rulings upset liberals.
“Last week, President Biden, who was marketed to the country as a moderate and an institutionalist, jumped in with both feet.
“He set up a pseudo-academic “commission” to ‘study’ the merits of packing the Supreme Court. Just an attempt to clothe this transparent power play in fake legitimacy.
“But alas, the far left cannot even wait for the fake theatrics of the fake study to play out.
“Today, Democrats in the Senate and House have announced they will once again threaten judicial independence from the steps of the Court.
“They’re introducing a bill to add 4 new seats to the Supreme Court so that Democrats can pack the Court, destroy its legitimacy, and guarantee the rulings liberals want.
“Across the ideological spectrum, top jurists have been outspoken on what a terrible idea court-packing would be.
“The late liberal icon, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, explicitly warned against court-packing, saying, quote, ‘if anything would make the Court appear partisan, it would be that.’ ‘Nine seems to be a good number.’
“Justice Stephen Breyer reaffirmed his own opposition just last week.
“The public, by the way, agrees. They see through this discredited concept. One survey late last year showed that a clear majority of Americans oppose packing the Supreme Court.
“But the farthest-left activists aren’t interested in the common good. They want power. And the same Democrats and the same corporate media that spent the last four years hyperventilating and declaring a new constitutional crisis was underway every 30 seconds seem to be perfectly content to play along.
“If Republicans had introduced a bill to add four Supreme Court seats for the last President to fill, there would have been weeks of wall-to-wall outrage on every newspaper and cable TV channel.
“Now it seems the main strategies are either to shrug and look the other way or to actively play along and lend credence.
“It’s not just about whether this insane bill becomes law. Part of the point here are the threats themselves.
“The left wants a sword dangling over the Justices when they weigh the facts in every case. As the Democratic Leader threatened just two years ago, Democrats want the Justices to know that they will ‘pay the price’ for rulings that Democrats don’t like.
“The left wants these swords dangling over the Senate, and state legislatures, and independent judges.
“The threats are the point. The hostage-taking is the point. And responsible people across the political spectrum have a duty to denounce this.”
Related Issues: Supreme Court, Senate Democrats
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