Below is my column on Fox.com discussing the most recent call to be “ruthless” and to pack the Supreme Court. It is only the latest call for fundamental changes in our system on the 250th anniversary of our revolution.
Here is the column:
“Let’s get ruthless.”
Those words are, unfortunately, nothing new in this age of rage. In just the last few weeks, various liberal pundits and politicians have been calling for radical and even violent action.
Even comedian Margaret Cho publicly declared this week that “we need a feral, bloodthirsty, violent Democrat.”
However, these words were reposted by Bill Kristol, the founder of the Weekly Standard and the current editor-in-chief of The Bulwark. Kristol was a leading conservative figure in the Republican Party.
Kristol left the Republican Party and is now a vehemently anti-Trump writer. There are certainly good-faith reasons why some conservatives have broken with Trump on a variety of issues.
However, the original column was endorsing the Democratic plan to pack the Supreme Court with an instant liberal majority to force through a slew of political changes in the country.
Various Democrats have been pledging to not only impeach Trump (and a long list of other figures), but to pack the Supreme Court as soon as they regain power.
James Carville declared, “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F— it. Eat our dust. Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”
This Nike School of Constitutional Law is catching on with a wide array of pundits and professors. Just do it.
Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out a radical agenda to change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” However, he warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described.” Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to allow these changes to occur.
Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder has put packing the Supreme Court front and center, explaining, “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.”
Years ago, I wrote an academic piece on the possible expansion of the Supreme Court, but there is a world of difference between that and a court-packing plan. Under my proposal, the court’s expansion would take almost two decades to ensure that no president could pack the court.
It was not just the company that Kristol is keeping on the issue, or his endorsement of the long-anathema concept of court packing, but also his rationale for the move. Kristol cited the successful Democratic gerrymandering efforts in California and Virginia as triumphs that should now propel the left to pack the Court.
Kristol reposted the call for court packing from his colleague Jonathan Last: “Expanding the Supreme Court is no different from redistricting in California and Virginia,” he said. “It is a proportionate response to Republican attempts to degrade liberal democracy and move America toward a post-liberal order.”
Praising governors Gavin Newsom and Abigail Spanberger for their “ruthless” leadership in response to Republican gerrymandering, Kristol insisted that Democrats must meet “force with force” and must now pack the Supreme Court. Being ruthless, he argues, is the “only road to preserving liberal democracy.”
There is, of course, a considerable difference between altering political districts and packing the courts. Political gerrymandering has been around since the earliest days of the Republic.
The courts are not the same political fungible units. Indeed, the favorite term on the left is “illiberal democracy” to refer to democratic systems used to curtail rights and weaken checks and balances. Yet this illiberal means is being cited by Kristol as essential to save liberal democracy.
Liberal justices have spoken out against these calls for court packing.
The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it would destroy the continuity and cohesion of the court.
She added, “If anything would make the court look partisan, 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 political districts are precisely that: political. They are part of the two political branches in a tripartite system. It is the courts that keep these political branches within their proper constitutional orbits.
There was, of course, no movement to pack the court when a series of liberal majorities rewrote major areas of constitutional law in the 1960s and 1970s. These demands from figures like Sen. Elizabeth Warren were only heard when the court began to rule against their chosen outcomes.
Warren explained that the court had to be packed to bring its rulings in line with “widely held public opinion.”
Of course, Article III was designed precisely to blunt such pressures to rule according to “widely held public opinion.” The Supreme Court is a counter-majoritarian body that was created to protect rights against the passions or demands of the majority.
As I discuss in my book, “Rage and the Republic,” the founders sought to avoid “democratic despotism” and “mobocracy” by creating barriers to direct democratic powers. The Supreme Court is essential as a bulwark against such impulse politics. Those pushing for an instant liberal majority would convert the court into the type of partisan judicial bodies seen in states like Wisconsin where jurists are selected to robotically vote for party priorities.
There is a reason why “ruthless” was not an attribute cited by anyone in the constitutional convention to be fostered in our Republic. On the contrary, the system is designed to temper ruthless passions for reasoned debate.
The court itself may be the ultimate test of the lingering capacity for reason among our citizens. Of course, we can be ruthless and tear down our institutions on the 250th anniversary of our Republic.
No democratic system is ever immune from self-inflicted wounds. That is why Benjamin Franklin reminded us that this remains our Republic if we can keep it. This year, we can celebrate that Republic, or we can ruthlessly destroy it in a fit of blind rage.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
N.B.: The original column was edited to make clear that Bill Kristol was reposting and endorsing the words of his colleague. I am still hoping that Kristol might still expressly reject this position and say that he was merely reposting a writer on the Bulwark and should not have highlighted this particular call for court packing. Thus far, he has not done so.
Kristol is a disgusting, degenerate, low life, lying sack of excrement! This “pretend” conservative, was, is nothing short of a Leftard. Along with the rest of their cohorts, French, and that other dipshit from the National Review. There are many of these AssHats, who were the “Never Trumpers” going back to 2015. I thoroughly despise these pretenders, for all the damage they’ve done over several decades.
. . . move America toward a post-liberal order.
That’s exactly the kind of overheated rhetoric that gins up hatred in TDS sufferers and leads to assassination attempts like we saw last night. These people are speaking to their unhinged mindless drones, knowing full well that their lies will be believed and have real-world consequences.
How many MAGATS does it take to change a light bulb? Zero. Trump tells them it has been changed, and they all sit in the dark and cheer.
Dear Mr. Turley, I am wondering if Anonymous @ 11:04 a.m. was referring to the Obama Library? This building is not only ugly, but it has also displaced many residents of the Jackson Park neighborhood. It still isn’t completed and the cost over-run is astronomical. How many folks have been displaced by the new White House ballroom? The answer? Zero. I do not see the Left saying anything about the displaced neighborhood folks.
The left’s reality-denial comments here are proof we need to reopen the mental hospitals.
Projection / red herring.
“THE ENEMY”
Good to know. Margaret Cho, Bill Kristol, James Carville, Michael Klarman, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Gavin Newsom, Abigail Spanberger, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Eizabeth Warren et al. are direct and mortal enemies of the American thesis of freedom and self-reliance, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, actual Americans, and America, and do not support the Conservative Republic established by the Founders; they support the “dictatorship of the majority,” the poor, through one-man, one-vote liberal democracy, which is precisely Karl Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the foundation of a communist society, rather than the severely restricted-vote American republic, understanding that the Founders were demonstrably “conservative Republicans” and not “liberal Democrats” in any sense of the word.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the Supreme Court should not be expanded beyond 9 justices.
Ruth’s poor judgement is why the Supreme Court has so many Trump appointments on it.
There should be one Justice per Federal court division.
Take RBG out of your comment.
Cole Allen is the reason left’s been calling Trump a nazi, facist, etc. It wasn’t for YOU or me to believe such implausibilities, it was for a someone like this guy.
Foundational change would be to create 9 to 12 regional Congresses each with their own supreme court. Otherwise, management of 330 million people is for a dictatorship, something we’ve been moving towards for over a century. The country/nation has a management problem. Power must be divided and used in smaller chunks. Our current system is too great and too corrupting.
Remember Public Law 62-5 ended increases in the House of Representatives, thus enhancing the corruption by making the goal more corruptible by its scarcity. While unity makes for strength, it also invites corruption and dictatorship.
Trump would have restricted this.
So I ask: who are the true tyrants, dictators, and fascists?
I always amazed that TDS types like Anon can read other people’s minds. It is an essential skill for every angry Lefty
This was Trump’s “rejected from art school” moment.
“So I ask: who are the true tyrants, dictators, and fascists?”
YOU. but you’re truly stupid as well.
I’m not the one trying to silence comedians like a fascist president would.
The only people engaged in silencing others – are those on the left.
Calling you liars – is not silencing you.
Your free to lie all you want.
And the rest of us are free to call you out as a liar.
Nor are you entitled to be paid millions to lie to people who no longer think you are funny and no longer wish to listen to you.
You are free to say whatever you want.
But you do not get paid to say it, unless people are willing to pay to listen.
The left media, left comics, left talk show hosts, left news are failing – because no one is listening.
You have done that to yourselves.
No one did that to you.
Grow up – you have the RIGHT to speak your mind. You are not ENTITLED to have others care what you say or pay to listen to it.
Is a fascist someone who discourages free expression?
If your answer is yes, and Trump discourages free expression, then Trump is a fascist.
Trump criticizes but he doesn’t do anything to actually infringe free speech. Biden, by contrast set up a ministry of truth and embedded federal agents in social media platforms to censor conservative speech and news stories – like the Hunter laptop story and many covid-related stories – that ran contrary to the official government narrative. Trump dismantled that entire government-social-media censorship complex. So by your reckoning Biden was fascist and Trump is not. But you’ll never admit that because it would threaten your cult-like mindset. But whether you admit it or not, that is the reality.
It is not fascist to criticize others for their expression.
BTW no one on the right is “discouraging free expression” – that was done under Obama and Biden – not Trump.
By YOUR standards – Obama and Biden and most democrats are fascists, and Trump is not.
Calling you a liar is NOT “discouraging your free expression”
But government directing others to censor you is.
ATS – where do you get the idiotic idea that Trump would have banned this ?
Trump showed up as the White House Correspondents Dinner last night – where the left AGAIN tried to assassinate him.
In remarks before and after Trump reiterated that this is about Free Speech.
The press is Free to poke fun at the president – Obama or Trump – though Seth Meyers is not the Press, he is a comedian.
Regardless, Trump uses his free speech to criticize those on the left – and often the press for LYING.
But he has not silenced them.
It is the Biden administration that was engaged in a mass campaign of censorship – censoring the speech of ordinary Americans.
There is no Trump equivalent to the mass censorship that Democrats have engaged in and when they have power continue to engage in.
The host is usually a comedian. This time it was a mind reader.
Trump had a say in who the host was, and it certainly wasn’t Seth Myers, Jimmy Kimmel, or Stephen Colbert. Trump deprived people of hearing what a comedian would have said.
That doesn’t sound like free speech to me.
The program had to be delayed due to a crazed shooter, and you’ve already pre-judged the program.
So, based on current reporting, we have a teacher who drove across country with a stop in his home town of Chicago.
He attempts to storm the security check point, get past and, according to reporting, wanted to shoot anyone in the Trump admin. Perhaps Trump himself.
So, severe TDS patient puts his TDS on display for all to see how unhinged he and those like him are.
And as a result, our resident TDS annony trolls are out in force, trying to convince . . . no one, that this was all a set up/fake. And the annony’s do it oh, so lamely.
I would like to see Professor Turley to specifically acknowledge when he discusses proposals to expand the Supreme Court that the number of justices is set by statute and the number of justices was changed by Congress a number of times before 9 was enacted in 1869. Here is a discussion of that history. https://sutherlandinstitute.org/congress-history-of-messing-with-supreme-court-size/
Maybe because it has been discussed so many times.
“As noteworthy as it is that Congress changed the number of Supreme Court justices seven times in the 80 years after the Constitution was enacted, it is more important to the debate today that the number of Supreme Court justices has remained nine for the last 153 years (and counting).
“There was, however, one significant attempt to change the number in the 1930s. Some of President Franklin Roosevelt’s proposed reforms intended to help the country emerge from the Great Depression were blocked after the Supreme Court found they were inconsistent with constitutional provisions. So, in 1937, the president announced a plan to modify the composition of the court:…The idea did not go over well politically or with the American people in general.”
“Taking all of this history into account, Shapiro makes an important point in concluding his analysis: “Just as two wrongs don’t make a right, you can’t depoliticize institutions by further politicizing them.”
https://sutherlandinstitute.org/congress-history-of-messing-with-supreme-court-size/
The intolerance laced with pure vitriol and hate is literally what the D brand cult lives on and for. They propose nothing to better America or it’s LEGAL citizens. Everything they preach makes them sound like bolsheviks demanding blood because it’s not their way period. Shows their true character and why they SHOULD NEVER BE IN POWER.
The left’s similarities to the Islamic Regime going scorched-earth is uncanny.
Give credit where credit is due: it was a democratic administration that saved America from Germany and Japan.
As soon as Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth heard “Shots!”, they ran to the closest bar.
Very good!
In the video of him charging the checkpoint, the shooter was dressed in black.
In the picture of him being detained, the shooter is naked.
Why is this?
Because they quickly stripped him to assure he had no more weapons nor was a suicide bomber.
One facet of suicide bombers is they explode the bomb. That’s crucial to the suicide part of the plan.
Are you that stupid?
Everyone in this article is a nitwit goblin
I used to play cops and robbers a lot when I was little.
I was very good at pretending to be shot.
After a lengthy soliloquy, I would finally topple over and die, clutching my abdomen.
It was very convincing.
You would have thought I had really died.
I liked Bill Kristol’s Fernando character. He was hilarious.
“Bill Kristol Suggests Illiberal Means Are Needed to Save Liberal Democracy” or to attract Flies.
Democrats (and Republicans also) don’t see themselves as just another Party manipulating the Government.
Just let Government be ‘Free Range’ Government. Don’t cage it up in Party politics, after all it’s presumably the People’s Government not the Parties.
If the Democrats will pack the courts then why shouldn’t the Republicans? During a lame duck session add half a dozen VERY partisan justices and let’s see how many the Dems then need to add to get the balance they desire. “We had to destroy the village to save it” could become both parties operating principle!
The Federalist Society already has. I believe 6 of 9 Supreme Court Justices are Federalist Society members, many having been groomed and protected from controversy in their judicial positions from before graduation from college. Many more Federal judges are also in their positions due to the Federalist Society efforts. It’s a bit like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but for courts, in order to overturn longstanding precedents and enrich the billionaire patrons.
Even Wolf Blitzer was fooled by the illusion. That’s how convincing it was.
That’s the point of an illusion. To make something seem real.
Yes. Like special effects in movies.
The reactions of real actors to a fake alien were real when the alien burst out of his chest.
They killed the shooter, just like they killed Epstein.
He won’t be telling any tales any time soon.
He’s alive, and sporting a nutty manifesto. TDS ruins lives!