Against packing the courts

The current push on the Left to expand the no-quarter approach to Supreme Court politics by introducing court-packing schemes is genuinely dangerous for the country. That’s worth thinking about, but it is also worth considering — not that I’ll shed any tears over it — that it’s dangerous to the political aspirations of the Democratic party, too. Republicans have bested them in all their own favorite games, gerrymandering, filibusters, and weaponizing congressional procedure prominent among them. They’d probably be better at court-packing, too. The Republicans may look divided and in disarray in the Trump era — and they are, of course — but it is the Democrats who have the more pressing long-term coalitional problem of being a party in which little old white liberal ladies lord over a growing and politically dynamic constituency that is much younger, much browner, and surely wondering why its members’ most pressing priorities have to be signed off on by that ghastly butcher Cecile Richards or that puffed-up PTA president Diane Feinstein. It isn’t obvious that Latino ethnic-solidarity politics is going to be a real big winner in UAW country. That permanent Democratic majority, like Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidency, is always on the way but never quite arrives.

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