Why the Supreme Court has Nine Justices | Opinion
In recent years, partisans on both sides of the political aisle have accused the sitting president of trying to "pack the courts." Democrats are now making those accusations with a vengeance. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett is "the court-packing the public should be focused on." Biden ally and Delaware senator Chris Coons asserted that the confirmation of Barrett would "constitute court-packing." Longtime Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee member Dick Durbin contended, "The American people have watched the Republicans packing the court for the past three and a half years."
That's not what "court-packing" means. Throughout American history, presidents routinely tried—with some ease when they were of the same party as the majority of the Senate, with some difficulty when the Senate was in unfriendly hands—to appoint judges who share their own visions of the Constitution and American governance. When vacancies open up on the bench due to the death or retirement of sitting judges, presidents fill those seats with new judges who share their values. What else would they do?
Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, and the author of Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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