Breyer Stepping Down Brings Calls For Packing the Court

(DailyDig.com) – The Supreme Court is the center of attention once again after Justice Stephen Breyer, the oldest Justice on the bench, announced that he was finally retiring after serving for more than two decades. As President Biden searches for a replacement, which he says will be a black woman, Democrats are once again pushing to pack the court.

In April of 2021, reports indicated that Democrats in both chambers of Congress were looking at potentially packing the Supreme Court, which means adding more justices to the bench in order to tip the balance of power in the nominating party’s favor. After Breyer announced his plans to retire, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reignited the debate by calling on Biden to expand the court.

Justice Breyer has an extraordinary record of public service. I’m very happy that President Biden will fill this seat by naming the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. And we ought to #ExpandTheCourt to give her at least four more new colleagues & rebalance this institution.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 27, 2022

In her tweet, Senator Warren expresses that this is the perfect opportunity for Biden to expand and therefore pack the court to favor Democrats. Packing the court could result in irreparable damage to the court’s independence and dilute the power it possesses to enforce the law of the land.

Despite former President Trump shifting the court’s power toward Conservatives, with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and eventually Amy Coney Barrett after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Breyer and Ginsburg argued that packing the court was a bad idea. In fact, the pair condemned the action at every opportunity to do so.

The Supreme Court isn’t supposed to be a politicized institution. People are already losing faith in the court; further politicizing it would likely worsen the problem. Ginsburg spoke with NPR in 2019, stating that there doesn’t need to be additional justices on the bench, asserting nine was a good number and that it’s been that way for a very long time.