Another example is the word bipartisan, which—in the context of policy debates—means winning votes from both Republican and Democratic members of Congress. But get a load of the slick sleight of hand Team Biden uses: “If you looked up ‘bipartisan’ in the dictionary, I think it would say support from Republicans and Democrats,” Anita Dunn, a senior Biden adviser, told The Washington Post. “It doesn’t say the Republicans have to be in Congress.” But as the Post’s Peter Stevenson pointed out, “...that’s a pretty different definition of ‘bipartisanship’ than the one Washington has been accustomed to for a long time—and it’s not how Biden defined it while campaigning for president last year.” (If you’re keeping score, Democrats are trying to pass their redefined definition of “infrastructure” by citing its “bipartisan” support—a term they also redefined.)
Democrats are also trying to redefine the term ‘court packing’. Everyone knows this term because FDR tried to do it in 1937; for example, in a 2017 NPR review of historian Robert Dallek’s Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life, Ron Elving referred to “what many consider FDR’s greatest mistake, his 1937 ‘court packing’ scheme to add six seats to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Biden even once referred to it as a “boneheaded” idea (more recently, he appointed a bipartisan commission to study the idea). Some prominent Democrats are arguing for their new definition. “Some people will say we’re packing the court. We’re not packing. We’re unpacking,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said. He’s not alone. “Republicans packed the court when Mitch McConnell held Merrick Garland’s seat open nearly a year before an election, then confirmed Amy Coney Barrett days before the next election,” Rep. Mondaire Jones said.
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