2020 White House hopeful and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) has reiterated his support for packing the Supreme Court, stating he views the policy proposal as “the one that I find most intriguing.”
In an interview with NBC News released Monday, Buttigieg discussed his plans to “overhaul” the nation’s highest court. The Indiana Democrat told the news outlet that he supports “whatever Supreme Court reform will depoliticize this body” in an effort to change its perception of “an almost nakedly political institution.”
“The reform of not just expanding the number of members but doing it in a way where some of them are selected on a consensus, nonpartisan basis, it’s a very promising way to do it,” he claimed. “There may be others. But the point is, we’ve got to get out of where we are now, where any time there is an opening, there is an apocalyptic, ideological firefight. It harms the court, it harms the country, and it leads to outcomes like we have right now.”
As Breitbart News senior editor Joel Pollak previously noted, Buttigieg’s plan to “reform” the Supreme Court is more about attempting to reverse the bench’s originalist shift than anything else:
While claiming that the plan would “depoliticize” the Court, the idea of adding additional judges has been floated by Democrats as a way to reverse the impact of President Donald Trump’s nominations, which have created a conservative majority.
Ironically, Democrats rejected a plan to pack the Court when proposed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s. The wildly popular New Deal president faced resistance from his own party when he sought to overcome the conservative jurisprudence of the Court, which had struck down many of his programs as unconstitutional, by packing it with more sympathetic appointees. Eventually, the Court itself buckled under the pressure, approving vast expansions of government power (a shift remembered ever since as the “switch in time that saved nine”).
The court-packing scheme is another sign that while some of Buttigieg’s policies strike a somewhat moderate tone — for example, he wants Medicare to be available to all, but not required for all — many of his ideas are staunchly left-wing.
Buttigieg, who is often portrayed as a moderate Democrat by the establishment media, previewed his radical position during a CNN town hall in March.
“It takes the politics out of it a little bit, because we can’t go on like this, where every time there’s a vacancy there’s these games being played and then an apocalyptic ideological battle over who the appointee is going to be,” the presidential candidate said of the courts. “If we want to save that institution, I think we better be ready to tune it up as well.”
Thus far, former Rep. Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (D-TX) is the only other White House contender to openly express support for the plan. “What if there were five justices selected by Democrats, five justices selected by Republicans, and those ten then picked five more justices independent of those who chose the first ten?” O’Rourke asked a crowd of supporters during a campaign stop in Iowa in March.
“I think that’s an idea we should explore,” he added.
Other presidential candidates such as Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have also indicated they won’t rule out dramatic changes to the bench, including adding extra justices, but have not outright endorsed the idea.
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