Ginsburg Bats Down 2020 Democrats' Proposal To Expand the Supreme Court
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Tuesday it would be a “bad idea” to add to the number of members on the U.S. Supreme Court, as some Democratic presidential candidates have suggested.
Those who have expressed openness to such a court-packing scheme in order to offset President Donald Trump’s appointments include Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, as well as former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke.
Additionally, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker has said he supports having a “national conversation” about changes to the Court.
The Constitution does not specify the number of Supreme Court justices, leaving it up to Congress to decide by statute.
Since the founding of the republic, the number has ranged from six to 10, but for the last 150 years it has been set at nine.
“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” Ginsburg told NPR.
“I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Court,” she added.
The FDR-backed Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 would have allowed him to “appoint up to six additional justices … for every justice older than 70 years, 6 months, who had served 10 years or more,” according to History.com.
Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, told History.com a majority of the public did not support the bill and Congress never voted on it.
“Congress and the people viewed FDR’s ill-considered proposal as an undemocratic power grab,” she said.
“The chief justice [Charles Evans Hughes] testified before Congress that the Court was up to date in its work, countering Roosevelt’s stated purpose that the old justices needed help with their caseload.”
Ginsburg believes the American people would have the same reaction now.
“If anything would make the Court look partisan,” she said, “it would be that — one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.'”
The justice contended this would take away from the Court’s legitimacy and independence.
“We are blessed in the way no other judiciary in the world is,” she noted.
“We have life tenure. The only way to get rid of a federal judge is by impeachment. Congress can’t retaliate by reducing our salary, so the safeguards for judicial independence in this country, I think, are as great or greater than anyplace else in the world.”
Following Democratic presidential candidates’ talk of increasing the number of justices, GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida introduced a constitutional amendment in March that would keep the number at nine.
Many have speculated whether Ginsburg — the oldest justice at 86 — will be the next to leave the bench.
Last summer, she hinted at a timeline for her retirement.
“My senior colleague, Justice John Paul Stevens, he stepped down when he was 90, so think I have about at least five more years,” she said.
If Ginsburg retired at 90, that would fall during a potential second term for Trump.
The justice told NPR she shared a dream she had with Stevens shortly before his death earlier this month.
“I said that my dream is that I will stay at the Court as long as he did,” Ginsburg recounted.
“And his immediate response was, ‘Stay longer!'”
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