Some Dems talk of expanding Supreme Court

WASHINGTON » The prospect that President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans will fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat before the year is out has ignited a call for major changes on the court, including expanding the number of justices.

Some Democratic senators, who had been averse to increasing the size of the nine-member court, said in the wake of Ginsburg’s death that the Republican rush to fill the high court vacancy could be a breaking point.

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey said on Twitter that if Republicans don’t allow the winner of the Nov. 3 presidential election to select the next justice, “we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.”

But the sudden vacancy also is fueling tensions among Democrats. While some progressives are urging presidential nominee Joe Biden to embrace reforms including adding justices to the court, he has so far resisted embracing such a major change.

Biden, who ran a relatively centrist primary campaign and spent 36 years in the Senate, is concerned that such moves would worsen divisions during a particularly polarized moment in American history.

Another worry is that changing the size of the court for the first time in 150 years would come back to bite the Democrats, leading to further expansion when Republicans next control both Congress and the White House. Faced with a 6-3 conservative court as the new year begins, Democrats would need to add four seats to overcome the Republicans’ edge. With a 15-justice court, just two more additions by the Republicans would solidify their advantage.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany pushed back against Democratic talk of expanding the court, citing Ginsburg’s own words in a 2019 interview with NPR in which she said “packing the court was a bad idea when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried it and I’m not in favor of all of that.”

Democrats said almost nothing about the Supreme Court at their convention in August. That changed in an instant over the weekend.

“Nothing is off the table” for Senate rules changes if Republicans quickly confirm a new justice, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York warned in conference call Saturday with Democratic senators, according to a person on the private call who was not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.