I kid you not. In an interview by Bill Hemmer on Fox News this afternoon, Senator Tim Kaine (D., Vt.) surmised — because, of course, they haven’t discussed the matter — that his party’s presidential nominee, Joe Biden, is probably refusing to answer the question of whether he supports packing the Supreme Court because . . . it turns out . . . “it’s not his business.” See, Biden is running for president, and it turns out that legislation regarding the Supreme Court is totally up to Congress. Nothing for Ol’ Joe to be concerned about.
You can check the clip. The senator did his best to keep a straight face, but it was a struggle.
To be clear, packing the Court means expanding its size so the President of the United States (which Biden hopes to be) can appoint justices of his choice (i.e., leftwing lawyers), thereby politicizing the tribunal into reaching the results preferred by Democrats.
As Charlie has related in detail, the “monstrous enormity” that is Court-packing earned its infamous designation when Franklin Delano Roosevelt — then the President of the United States, at the zenith of his power and popularity following his landslide 1936 victory — threatened to expand the size of the Court and appoint progressives who would greenlight the New Deal, elements of which were being stalled by the Court (because of that whole Constitution thingy). His radical proposal was rejected.
To say the president has no interest in Court-packing is like saying President Obama had no interest in Obamacare because it was up to Congress to enact it — he was apparently just sitting around with his pen waiting for the phone to ring.
I guess it’s unclear who Biden believes is responsible for signing legislation into law — despite having been a senator for 36 years before serving as vice president for eight. But as Kaine clearly knows because he was purporting to outline what the Constitution says — though he conveniently omitted this part — in order to take legal effect, congressional bills have to be signed by, yes, the president of the United States.
As many of us around here have observed, moreover, the Court cannot be packed unless the Democrats take control of the Senate and eliminate the filibuster. That would open the floodgates for Biden to enact agenda he has been running on which entails — all together now — legislation. One might think he had a mild interest in the matter.
At his opening statement in today’s start of the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Senator John Kennedy (R., La.) proclaimed that the Democrats’ tactic of making assertions that are manifestly false will not work because “the American people are not morons.”
Senate Democrats are obviously committed to testing that proposition.