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Ruth Bader Ginsburg death: Democrats threaten to 'pack the Supreme Court' in 2021 if Trump's nominee is confirmed

The president's opponents have slammed the GOP establishment's move to find a new justice before the November 3 election

With the political atmosphere heating up over the succession of Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg who passed away last week in Washington DC, the Democrats have threatened to pack the apex court with extra judges if President Donald Trump’s candidate gets confirmed. 

On Saturday, September 19, Trump urged the Republican Party-dominated Senate to consider “without delay” his upcoming nomination to fill the vacant seat. If it goes through, Trump will make his third appointment to the top court inside one term, after Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. His opponents fear that the president would appoint another judge of his liking to tilt the balance of the court in favor of the conservatives who are already in dominance. They have been more critical over the issue since the presidential election is just six weeks away now and demand that the seat should be filled up only after the election gets over.

It may be mentioned here that Ginsburg, an iconic liberal judge, wanted not to be replaced till a new president took office as her last wish. She served in the Supreme Court for 27 years since her appointment by former president Bill Clinton. 

Democrats threaten to expand the court size if they win Senate

The Democrats have warned that they will expand the size if they succeed in flipping the Senate this November. Joe Kennedy III, a representative from Massachusetts and the grandson of former president Robert F Kennedy, tweeted Sunday saying: “If he holds a vote in 2020, we pack the court in 2021. It's that simple.”

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, who is also a representative from New York, tweeted saying: “If Sen. McConnell and @SenateGOP were to force through a nominee during the lame-duck session -- before a new Senate and President can take office - then the incoming Senate should immediately move to expand the Supreme Court.” In another tweet, he said: “Filling the SCOTUS vacancy during a lame duck session, after the American people have voted for new leadership, is undemocratic and a clear violation of the public trust in elected officials. Congress would have to act and expanding the court would be the right place to start.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has also made the headlines for wrong reasons in the middle of the controversy over Ginsburg’s succession. Hours after the 87-year-old judge’s death, he said Trump’s nominee to replace her “will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate”. However, when Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, which was also an election year, he repeatedly opposed the idea of even holding a hearing over his succession. Scalia, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, was replaced by Gorsuch the next year. 

Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, who recently defeated Kennedy III in a Democratic primary in the state, slammed McConnell to tweet last Friday, September 18: “Mitch McConnell set the precedent. No Supreme Court vacancies filled in an election year. If he violates it, when Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.” California Senator Dianne Feinstein tweeted her own statement saying: "The Senate should not consider a Supreme Court nomination until after the presidential inauguration. Those aren’t my words, they’re the words of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham."
 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the fiercest critics of Trump, even threatened a second impeachment of the president. On Sunday, September 20, she did not rule out the idea of the Democrat-controlled House impeach Trump yet again (he was impeached in December last year over the Ukraine affairs but was acquitted by the Senate later) to force the Senate to hold a trial to remove him from office so that the battle over his nomination for Ginsburg’s replacement is delayed. 

Democrats have been vouching for expanding Supreme Court

The issue has also brought to the fore the idea of a number of Democratic leaders on reforming the Supreme Court by adding more judges to its nine seats. Former presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke besides Kamala Harris, who is now the vice presidential candidate, had raised the possibility of making the nine-seat court into a 15-seat one. Buttigieg was one of the first to table the idea of expanding the top court in March saying it would “de-policitize” it. According to experts, the Democrats’ idea of expanding the court (or court packing) is aimed at increasing the presence of liberal judges on the bench. 

It is not the first time that a president has made attempts to pack the court. The four-time Democratic president tried to pack the court in 1937 when he wanted to pass his New Deal laws and required more conservative judges to back his initiative. He proposed a new bill -- Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 -- to expand the bench from nine to 15 justices, citing the need for an “infusion of new blood in the courts” but his effort was criticized by both his own party and the Republicans and it subsequently failed.