Supreme Court: The Democrats’ threat
“The Supreme Court as we once knew it died last year,” said Garrett Epps in TheAtlantic.com. The battle over what’s left of a once respected institution has now “spilled into public view,” with Democratic and Republican senators sending extraordinary messages to the justices about their political independence, or lack of it. First, five Democratic senators filed a “friend of the court” brief in a case about New York City gun laws, accusing the court’s conservative 5-4 majority of doing the bidding of “corporate and Republican political interests” on such issues as voting rights, partisan gerrymandering, dark money, and environmental regulation. “The Supreme Court is not well,” the Democrats’ brief stated, warning that the public may demand the court be “restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics”—a threat to expand the nine-member court and pack it with progressives. In response, all 53 Republican senators sent a letter “assuring the justices that the Republican Party has their back” and calling Democrats “a direct, immediate threat to the independence of the judiciary.”
“It’s hard to describe to nonlawyers how truly extraordinary” the Democrats’ brief is, said David French in NationalReview.com. You can spend a lifetime reading Supreme Court filings and not find one that resorts to “character assassination” and “transparently obvious allegations of judicial corruption” to buttress the underlying legal arguments. On top of that, the Democrats’ threat to restructure the court translates to: “Nice nineperson Supreme Court you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.” That threat “is a massive stroke of luck” for President Trump, said Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post. In 2016, more than 25 percent of Trump voters cited the court as “the most important factor.” By escalating the stakes, Democrats are giving those on the fence a renewed reason to vote Republican in 2020.
Besides, the premise of the Democratic senators’ brief is flawed, said Ilya Shapiro in USAToday.com. During the court’s last term, the four liberal justices voted as a bloc 51 times while the five conservatives did so only 37 times. Moreover, of the 20 cases where the court split 5-4, only seven decisions had the “expected ideological divide of conservatives over liberals.” In months and years to come, “a reinvigorated conservative grouping may yet come to dominate the court—especially if Trump fills another seat—but it hasn’t happened yet.”