JUST PACK THE COURT

Here’s a new one. Democrats want to change the rules. When a possibility arose in mid-1992 that then-President George H.W. Bush might have an opportunity to choose a new United States Supreme Court justice, then-Sen. Joe Biden, D-Delaware, suggested the president should adhere to an unwritten rule and not name a nominee until after the November election.

When then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, couldn’t get all of his judiciary nominees passed in 2013, he engineered a change in the rules to allow a simple majority vote for confirmation.

When Donald Trump was elected president in a massive upset in 2016, Democrats lobbied to get electors to change their vote. Then, with the help of the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign, they tried to claim the Trump campaign had ties to Russia. Then they filed suit to stop one lawful Trump action after another. Then …

Now, with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh confirmed after Senate Democrats tried to make 35-year-old, uncorroborated charges against him stick, they want to reform — sounds so much better than “change” or “alter,” doesn’t it? — the high court.

It’s all the rage in leftist punditry these days.

Of course, there’s the straightforward proposal of Democrats simply winning Congress next month, the House impeaching Kavanaugh and the Senate convicting him (requiring a two-thirds majority, which would never happen).

But that is justice-specific. They need a foolproof method of getting what they want.

Among the ideas suggested:

› Eighteen-year terms for justices (which would require a constitutional amendment to enact).

› Reform of recusal practices (justices currently can decide whether to recuse and do not have to give reasons).

› Congressional limits on the court’s jurisdiction to hear certain types of cases.

› Limits on justices’ financial holdings and outside appearances.

› Senior justices would be given fewer responsibilities in a type of emeritus position.

› Congressional requirement of a supermajority court vote (6-3) to invalidate legislation.

› Better policing of justices’ conflicts of interest.

But the one that has the left salivating is expanding the court. To counteract a majority of conservative justices, Democrats would increase the size of the court to give it a liberal majority.

Oh, they would have to have a Democratic president, a Democratic House and 60 votes in the Senate, but, remember, they had that as recently as 2009 and 2010. And they don’t have a constitutional edict to say they can’t increase the court’s size.

The Constitution, after all, established the high court but not its size. It began with six members, had seven for 30 years, nine for 26 years, 10 for three Civil War years, seven for three more years, then has had nine since 1869.

“The idea of expanding the size of the Supreme Court will get traction if the Democrats take the White House and Congress in 2020,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, told the Los Angeles Times earlier this year. “It is the only way to keep there from being a very conservative Court for the next 10-20 years.”

What is their optimum size? Eleven, for now, has been suggested, but a Rutgers professor, writing in Time in July, suggested 27 or even more.

Now packing the court has been tried by Democrats before — just over 80 years ago — in 1937. No less than liberal god Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted it. He didn’t like the way the court was ruling against his New Deal agencies, so he wanted to change the rules. He wanted to add a new justice for every current one that turned 70 years old and didn’t retire within six months — up to 15.

“[W]e must take action to save the Constitution from the Court,” he said, “and the Court from itself.”

It didn’t go so well for him. The American people didn’t want it, and eventually a Senate dominated by his own party rejected it.

A Senate committee report at the time called it “a needless, futile and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle … without precedent or justification.”

A new campaign, the 1.20.21 Project, which suggests the court be expanded by four members, was launched by two liberal Harvard professors last week. But they’re hardly the first of their ilk to opine such an idea this year.

“Court-packing is bad,” Scott Lemieux wrote in The New Republic in May, just before the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, “but allowing an entrenched majority on the Supreme Court to represent a minority party that refuses to let Democratic governments govern would not be acceptable or democratically legitimate, either.”

“A thoughtful court-packing proposal would ensure that the Court more carefully reflects the mores of the time,” Todd N. Tucker, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, wrote in Jacobin earlier this year, “rather than shackling democracy to the weight of the past.”

Just what we need — a Supreme Court that rules by coin flips, emotion and whether the Starbucks latte was prepared correctly.

No matter how you look at it, though, it’s still Democrats attempting to change the rules because they didn’t get their way. We give them that chance only at our peril.