In what might be the most-bizarre presidential campaign cycle in one of the most-bizarre years in American history, a singular issue was crystallized: the issue of whether, if elected, the Biden-Harris team intents to “pack” the Supreme Court, expanding the high court’s membership to tip the balance of the court from conservative to progressive.
At a time when Democrats are wrongly accusing the president and Senate Republicans of hijacking the process by trying to fill the court’s vacancy before the inauguration, court packing represents an actual attempt to hijack the long-established norms of the Constitution’s separation of powers.
Worse is the silence by Vice President Biden and Senator Harris on the subject. Despite promising to answer the issue when pressed during the Vice Presidential Debate, Senator Harris deflected, first spinning a historically inaccurate yarn about President Lincoln’s attitude when presented with a vacancy less than a month before the 1864 election, and then accusing the Trump administration of “packing” the federal courts by appointing philosophical conservatives and libertarians (despite the fact that appointing philosophical compatriots to federal courts is what every administration does and is expected to do).
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