Sheldon Whitehouse Taunts Biden and Other Dems for Being Too 'Chicken' to Pack Supreme Court

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., has added schoolyard taunts to his call to pack the Supreme Court with an instant liberal majority. Last week, Whitehouse denounced former President Joe Biden and other Democrats for being “too chicken” to pack the Court and, in the view of many of us, destroy the institution that has been critical to the success of this Republic for 250 years.

The Lever’s David Sirota, a former speechwriter and adviser to Bernie Sanders, set the table for Whitehouse by asking him about how the public can join the resistance to the Court, which is “enabling an anti-democratic project.” With that, Whitehouse was off to the chicken races:

“Well, I think it starts with truth telling and I think the chief executive of the United States has the proverbial bully, the bulliest of all pulpits, and should be prepared to make the argument about what has gone wrong with the courts. The Biden administration was highly reluctant to do that. They completely chickened out. Biden set up that lame committee commission on the Supreme Court and then squelched both Judge Gertner and Professor Tribe when they wanted to describe some of the actual problems at the court so that they couldn’t even get that into the report.”

He then added:

“The Biden people didn’t want to go there. They were completely chicken about all that. They wanted no part of that. And it — really wasn’t until the very end, in his last speech after he and Harris had both lost that Biden seemed to have at least somewhat awakened to the fact that the Supreme Court had a real integrity problem.”

The one thing upon which we agree is that the Biden commission was a sham. At the time, I wrote a piece entitled “Is Biden’s Supreme Court Commission Packed to Fail?” I wrote about how the Administration assembled an array of far-left faculty to debate radical changes to the Court. It was breathlessly followed by the press and many on the left as figures like Tribe denounced the Court as fundamentally broken. Of course, few of these voices, including Tribe, held those views when the Court ruled their way with a liberal majority.