By any measure, packing the Supreme Court with an influx of new members through legislation is an attack on a bedrock “norm.” Back in 2017, when the idea was merely a gleam in the eye of a handful of academics, Ilya Somin warned that “the norm against court-packing justified by more than just tradition. Court-packing is a menace to the role of judicial review as a check on the power of political majorities.”
But now some Democrats are on board with the notion, which seems more than a little off-message (if not hypocritical). For the last two years they have expressed legitimate concerns over Trump’s attacks on political, legal, and constitutional norms, and the issue could be especially powerful in 2020.
But, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
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