Toward the end of Donald Trump’s first term, Democrats launched the narrative that if they reclaimed the White House, they would pack the U.S. Supreme Court to create a liberal majority.
Prior to the 2020 election, then-President Joe Biden pushed back on that notion, but after he was elected, Democrats tried to move forward with legislation to add justices to the bench.
Now, Democrat strategist James Carville is calling on his party to take over the Supreme Court, using the tired narrative that it would amount to “saving our democracy.”
As we were getting closer to election day in 2020, Democrats were really pushing for Biden to make packing the Supreme Court part of his platform.
Biden is a smart politician, and he knew that if he wanted to attract the moderate vote, there was no way he could say he was going to agree to this, so he sidestepped the issue very carefully.
When asked about packing the Court, Biden responded, "I've already spoken: I'm not a fan of court packing, but I don't want to get off on that whole issue. I want to keep focused.”
This was the same stance Biden had taken during a Democratic Party primary debate in which he stated, "I would not get into court packing. We add three justices. Next time around, we lose control, they add three justices. We begin to lose any credibility the court has at all."
Biden was only in office a few months when Democrats in Congress decided to try to test these waters.
A bill led by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) proposed to increase the seats on the Supreme Court from nine to 13, adding four seats, which is what the Dems needed for control.
Since Biden had already rejected the notion, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) stated that she would not floor the legislation in the House. She stated, "I don't know that that's a good idea or bad idea. I think it's an idea that should be considered. And I think the president's taking the right approach to have a commission to study such a thing. It's a big step."
Co-founder of liberal advocacy group Demand Justice, Brian Fallon, a former Democrat Senate aide, responded, "Our task now is to build a grassroots movement that puts pressure on every Democrat in Congress to support this legislation because it is the only way to restore balance to the court and protect our democracy.”
Democrats always show their ignorance by insisting that this country is a democracy when it is, in fact, a constitutional republic. That does not sound quite as urgent, however, when you are talking about reshaping the Court.
To that point, Carville has suggested statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, which would add more congressional seats for Dems, and he also favors packing the court, stating, "They're going to have to do it. They're just going to have to do it. And they may have to expand the [Supreme Court] to 13 members.”
He later added, "Any of those things in isolation I would be skeptical about. I would be cautious about. I would say, 'Well, I don't know if that's the greatest idea in the world, you're opening Pandora's Box. ’If you want to save democracy, I think you got to do all of those things because we just are moving further and further away from being anything close to democracy."
This is the same failed line of attack Democrats chose to try and defeatTrump in 2024, and it did not work. Ironically, Carville had previously called on Dems to stop being so dramatic, but now he is the one ringing the bell. It’s all about engagement, and Carville knows that by making these comments, the far left in the country will blow him up on social media for promoting court packing as a way to add more blue seats in the House and Senate. But there is a problem… they don’t have the votes to do it.
