They’re scared: Dems’ big plan for Trump's pet Supreme Court is coming

Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, listen as US President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress REUTERS

House Speaker Mike Johnson already knows what the Republican-dominated Supreme Court is in for when Democrats get big-enough control of Congress and the White House, writes Slate’s Alexis Romero. That’s why Johnson tried to pass a new law out of the House to stop it.

“Johnson … led an effort Wednesday to amend the Constitution and cap the number of Supreme Court justices at nine. Since the size of the court is currently set by federal law, not by the Constitution, Johnson said the amendment was necessary to stop Democrats from adding justices to the court,” wrote Romero. “Over the course of 24 hours, Johnson announced his plan to introduce the amendment and had it brought to the House floor, only for it to immediately fail along party lines.”

President Donald Trump has been having a bit of a romp lately with his tailor-made Republican Supreme Court imparting huge new power to the executive and legal immunity for Trump to do as he wills with state agencies, immigration and the very face of Washington DC., and the White House. Romero said “it doesn’t take a brain surgeon (or even a lawyer) to understand why the leader of the House GOP would like to keep in place a Supreme Court with six Republican appointees,” but he added that these kinds of legislative efforts are extremely rare coming from any speaker.

But New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out that “Democrats are getting serious about court reform.” Former Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris also officially advocated for expanding the court from nine to 13 justices because the country already has 13 intermediate courts of appeal and a 13-member Supreme Court would allow each justice to review motions from a lower court one-to-one.

But Johnson wants Congressional Republicans to jettison the power to expand the court before Democrats use it to neutralize the conservative majority that granted Trump immunity from crimes while in the White House and nearly removed Constitutional birthright citizenship.

Romero called it an extreme bid by the Speaker for “constitutional self-castration.”

“But Republican legislators would rather sabotage their own chamber’s constitutional authority than allow Democrats the chance to reform the court,” said Romero. “In opposition to Johnson’s proposal, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark noted that the amendment would strip Congress of ‘yet another constitutional authority that is meant to be controlled by the American people’s representatives.’”

“Think for a second about the moral calculus the GOP is doing,” urged Romero. “We’re talking about a system of congressional authority over the court that has lasted for 250 years. And Republicans are so scared of the electorate voting for judicial reform that they would eliminate a key piece of that century-old authority in the two months before they’re likely voted out of office.”

But the court-reform debate is raging, said Romero, because the nation’s high court is deeply detached from the public. It is a court that “avoids contending with ethics complaints against its own members, while blessing ethical violations in the White House.” Its judges demand the privacy of no cameras in its chambers, while allowing states to “invade the private medical decisions of women across the country,” he said. It’s also a court that “anonymously votes behind closed doors in secret rulings, and does so in support of Trump’s not-so-secret effort to disenfranchise votes by mail.”

“Until all of that changes, court reform will be top of mind and top of discussion, no matter what the Republicans try to do before November,” Romero assured.

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