Purple Political Breakdown

This week is a different kind of Purple Political Breakdown: a solo, chat-driven deep dive on one question. Do you support packing the Supreme Court? Before you answer, Radell Lewis walks the entire board, because the honest version of this debate starts earlier than most coverage admits.

You do not need new seats to pack a court if you control who fills the seats you already have. In 2016, Justice Scalia dies and Mitch McConnell blocks Merrick Garland for nearly a year on a "let the voters decide" standard he branded the "Biden rule." In 2020, weeks before the election, he reverses himself and confirms Amy Coney Barrett after tens of millions of Americans have already voted. The frame other coverage skips: the Garland blockade and the Barrett rush were already a form of packing the existing nine through procedure.

From there, the history that undercuts the idea that nine is sacred. The number is not in the Constitution. Article III leaves it to Congress, which has changed it seven times, from six justices in 1789, to Lincoln adding a tenth seat in 1863, to the nine we have settled on since 1869. Then the cautionary tale: FDR's 1937 plan to add up to six justices died 70 to 20 in his own Democratic Senate, even as the Court quietly started upholding the New Deal anyway.

Then the mechanics. Expansion is an ordinary statute, but it runs straight into the filibuster, which means ending the filibuster first. The Judiciary Act would take the Court from nine to thirteen, one justice per appeals circuit, though the strongest advocates argue less from circuit math and more from a bench they call rigged. We break down Brian Tyler Cohen's pitch to Gavin Newsom, and why messaging that makes people lose faith in the institution itself can backfire.

Here is why Radell would start somewhere else: term limits and an enforceable ethics code. Eighteen-year staggered terms with a senior status off-ramp that may be achievable by statute, supported across the aisle by Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi and liberal scholar Akhil Amar, echoed in John Roberts's own early writing, with 49 of 50 states already limiting their high-court judges and bipartisan polling supermajorities (PRRI: 85 percent of Democrats, 76 percent of independents, 67 percent of Republicans; Marquette: 73 percent of Republicans). On ethics, we cover Senator Whitehouse's SCERT Act, the Court's toothless 2023 self-written code, and the Fix the Court finding that Justice Clarence Thomas reported gifts valued near 4.2 million dollars over two decades, far more than the rest of the bench combined. Radell is careful throughout to separate what is documented from what cannot be proven.

The bottom line: if the goal is a Court the public trusts again rather than one your side controls for a single cycle, term limits and ethics come first. Court packing can follow, but only with airtight, bipartisan messaging and the number locked into the Constitution so the country does not spend the next decade adding and subtracting justices. Steel-manned, receipts on the table, live chat the whole way, and an honest landing spot at the end.

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