Packing the Supreme Court has been talked about for a while on the left. President Trump was very successful in putting judges on federal benches. The opposition has noticed. What better way to nullify all of those appellate court judges than to go to the top and make any lower decision invalid. That is the dream that Eric Holder put out yesterday while addressing  a seminar for the Brookings Institution. From Breitbart News:

Holder began his presentation with what he called “three realities.” First, he said, “Democrats and progressives, are, and have been, uncomfortable with the acquisition and the use of power.” Republicans and conservatives, he said, were not.

Second, he said, the Supreme Court and other courts had been “political bodies.”

And third, he said, the Supreme Court had largely upheld the status quo in its decisions, “sometimes in a way that is inimical to our founding ideals.”

I don’t know what “founding ideals” he is talking about here. He doesn’t elaborate on that platitude. He does say that often the rulings come from the “stunted mindsets” of ideologues.  That is one opinion.

This isn’t the first time that the idea of packing the court has been seriously broached. FDR hatched a plan to add more judges to the court based on the age of the current judges.

[…]President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to put restrictions on the court when it came to age. Largely seen as a political ploy to change the court for favorable rulings on New Deal legislation, the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, commonly referred to as the “court-packing plan,” was Roosevelt’s attempt to appoint up to six additional justices to the Supreme Court for every justice older than 70 years, 6 months, who had served 10 years or more.

The plan ultimately failed. Several pieces of legislation for The New Deal were struck down, but enough got through to advance a majority of the plan.

It should be noted that the Constitution does not limit the number of judges on the supreme court. So it is within the power of congress to add members.

As I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago, Venezuela  packed their supreme court when  Hugo Chavez wasn’t getting his way.  That should serve as an example to everyone what can happen.

It was only after Chavez stacked the court that, in 2006, he ran on a fully socialist platform. When he won re-election that year, the justices of the Supreme Court stood and chanted a rhyme to the effect of “great, Chavez is not leaving!”

After Chavez’s 2006 win, he began confiscating thousands of private businesses – including media outlets, oil and power companies, mines, farms, banks, factories, and grocery stores.

“They basically took over the entire economy,” Canova noted.

The country has fallen into a failed state since . The supreme court is in a lot of ways the last protection against one party rule. We are fortunate that the congress is split so closely. I have no doubt that the left would take advantage of a super majority to implement their dreams. That would spell the end of capitalism and usher in the utopian dream of the leftists. In other words, we would become Venezuela.