Please note: Shopping and stocking up on groceries this week has gone terribly wrong and I have wrenched my back. Even with a full load of pain killers, I can only sit up for a few minutes at a time. So I am publishing the opening that I wrote earlier this week, and will check in later to read comments. If you’d like, sign me up again for next week and I’ll publish all the rest of the items from this week and new items. Or add your items in Comments if you’d rather. Sorry I can’t do more tonight!
We have a unique opportunity and necessary obligation to expand SCOTUS! The size of the court had been set at nine justices since the 1860s because there were 9 judicial circuits that they oversaw. www.brookings.edu/… According to the Brookings link, arguments to expand in the past went nowhere in part because over time the court was self-correcting. Now most of the conservative bench was selected by presidents who lost the popular vote and confirmed by fewer and fewer Senators. As you probably know, because rural states get the same number of Senators as urban states and rural tends to vote Republican, even when they were the majority of the Senate, the GOP actually represented a minority of the American people. Confirmation votes have been narrower and narrower, falling more and more along party lines. Fascinating table from Brookings:
| Supreme Court nominee | Vote |
| Ginsburg 1993 | 96-3 |
| Breyer 1994 | 87-9 |
| Roberts 2005 | 78-22 |
| Sotomayor 2009 | 68-31 |
| Kagan 2010 | 63-37 |
| Alito 2006 | 58-42 |
| Gorsuch 2017 | 54-45 |
| Thomas 1991 | 52-48 |
| Kavanaugh 2018 | 50-48 |
But because of the overwork of the court, we may have a historic opportunity to enlarge the court without stimulating new rounds of court packing: Just change the law from nine to one justice for each circuit, currently 13. This will improve the court’s reflection of the people, and therefore its legitimacy, without expanding the court beyond what is needed for good governance. And it “just so happens” that those four new justices would be nominated by President Biden and confirmed by the Democratic Senate.
This would of course likely result in better SCOTUS decisions regarding civil rights of all sorts, including women’s reproductive rights. But, cough, we’re only doing it to improve the workings of the court and ensure no justice is overwhelmed with the supervision of too many circuits, cough.
As noted, this is an open thread. Please discuss. Thanks!