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The challenge

“We should pack the Supreme Court”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. Packing the Court is how you end the Court. The number has been nine since eighteen sixty-nine. When Franklin Roosevelt tried to add justices in nineteen thirty-seven, his own party's Senate Judiciary Committee killed it. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in twenty nineteen that nine seems to be a good number. And be honest about the timing. The push for more seats showed up right when the Court started reading the Constitution as written. Losing cases isn't a crisis. It's losing. You'll say Republicans played hardball on Garland and Barrett. Confirming or declining a nominee is the Senate's job under Article Two. Changing the size of the Court to change the rulings is something else. Let me ask you this. When the other side wins and adds four more, what's your plan? Pack the Court once, and you don't get a Court. You get a scoreboard.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. Nine has been the settled number for over a century and a half. That stability is why the whole country still obeys the rulings.

    The Judiciary Act of 1869 set the Supreme Court at nine justices, and the number has not changed since.

  2. Even a wildly popular president with a huge majority couldn't get his own party to pack the Court. They saw it would end judicial independence.

    In 1937 the Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee issued a report sharply rejecting Franklin Roosevelt's plan to add justices, and the plan failed.

  3. This Court isn't a partisan rubber stamp. It follows the text even when conservatives don't like where the text goes.

    In Bostock v. Clayton County in 2020, Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed by President Trump, wrote the majority opinion that liberals widely cheered.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Republicans already broke the norms by blocking Merrick Garland in 2016 and then rushing Amy Coney Barrett through in 2020, so adding seats just restores balance.

Nate: The Senate's power to confirm or decline a nominee is written into Article Two. Using it is politics. Changing the number of seats to change the outcomes is a different animal. Do it once and the next majority does it too, until the Court is just a third legislature in robes.

The lines

Sources

  1. United States Congress, Judiciary Act of 1869 (1869)
  2. United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Report on Reorganization of the Federal Judiciary (1937)
  3. NPR, Nina Totenberg, Interview with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2019)
  4. Supreme Court of the United States, Bostock v. Clayton County (2020)

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