By Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell, The Daily Signal | December 09, 2024
A coalition of conservative leaders, led by a think tank founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, is urging the Senate to maintain the integrity of the Supreme Court by passing a constitutional amendment.
“With the recent election representing a resounding rejection of such proposals,” the letter to U.S. senators says, “it is time for Congress and the States to preserve the integrity and independence of the Supreme Court through a constitutional amendment limiting the number of justices on the court to nine.”
The coalition, led by Advancing American Freedom, asks senators to co-sponsor the Keep Nine Amendment to begin the process of adopting a constitutional amendment “to ensure the independence of the Court and the liberties of the people it was created to protect.”
According to the letter, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court “as an impartial institution and nonpolitical branch under our Constitution” is under attack.
2024 12 6 Keep Nine Coalition against Court PackingDownload
“From leaking draft opinions to threatening Justices and their families outside their homes,” the letter says, “perhaps no attempt to influence judicial opinions would damage the Court’s integrity so much as the threat of court-packing.”
When Vice President Kamala Harris was asked on the campaign trail whether she supported packing the Supreme Court with additional justices, she said, “I do believe there should be some kind of reform of the court, and we can study what that actually looks like.”
In September, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced the Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act, which would expand the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to 15 over the next 12 years.
“Attempts to increase the number of Justices on the Court to achieve political ends used to be widely recognized as destructive of the institution,” the coalition says.
The conservative leaders who signed the letter include the general counsel for Advancing American Freedom, J. Marc Wheat; the director of the Keep Nine Coalition, Roman Buhler; Students for Life Action President Kristan Hawkins; the CEO of Concerned Women for America, Penny Nance; the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Ralph Reed; the director of the Center for Judicial Renewal, Phillip Jauregui; and many others.
The letter lays out past attempts to pack the Supreme Court. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 proposed expanding the highest court in the land. The effort faced fierce opposition from Republicans and Democrats alike.
Henry F. Ashurst, a Democratic senator from Arizona at the time, is often credited with delaying the bill and ensuring it died in the Senate.
“Only in the last few years has the bipartisan consensus against the threat of court-packing broken down,” the letter says. “Now is the time to lower the temperature. Proponents of such proposals claim it will restore the Court’s integrity, but nothing could be further from the truth.”
The now-deceased Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s court-packing scheme made the South American nation’s highest court into a “political arm that today supports the dictatorial excesses of [his successor] Nicolás Maduro.”
Venezuela demonstrates how court-packing can “destroy judicial independence and transform the judiciary into a political pawn,” the letter says.
Elizabeth (Troutman) Mitchell is the reporting fellow for The Daily Signal and co-host of "The Daily Signal Podcast.
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