The Democratic case for packing the courts, as made by, most recently, Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, is a kind of confession. The Left understands the Supreme Court as a genie that exists to grant Democratic wishes: Poof! Abortion! Shazam! Gay marriage! It is far more convenient to enjoy one-stop utopianism imposed by the Supreme Court than to have 50 fights in the state legislatures in Topeka, Lansing, Boise, etc. The Left consequently understands that a Court constrained by textualism — the radical belief that we write down laws for a reason rather than simply asking Jamelle Bouie what he’d prefer — would be a hindrance to its political agenda, which includes serial violations of the Bill of Rights on matters ranging from free speech to freedom of religion to the right to keep and bear arms. (One half-expects Elizabeth Warren and Jacob Frey to pop up like pests in some political version of Whac-A-Mole and make the case for the forced quartering of federal troops.) That is one of the things that must be plainly understood about the question that Joe Biden refuses to answer: The assault on the Supreme Court is only a proxy for an assault on the Bill of Rights.

The court-packing scheme is part of a series of proffered shenanigans by which the Democratic Party means to establish long-term single-party rule in the United States. The only real reason for turning the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico into a state, as some Democrats demand, would be creating new Senate seats that would be entirely or almost entirely Democratic. Abolishing the Electoral College — which is to say, usurping the role of the states in presidential elections — is of interest to Democrats only because they believe that they would win more presidential elections under a national electoral system than under the current federal system. We have seen similar shenanigans conducted at the state level: California’s so-called open-primary system was presented as a progressive advance for democracy, but it is simply a way to keep Republican candidates off of general-election ballots in many cases and offer Californians instead the choice between a Democrat and a different Democrat.