[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 65 (Thursday, April 15, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Page S1952]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           U.S. SUPREME COURT

  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, time and again, prominent Democrats 
show they are no longer content to work within the ground rules and 
norms of our institutions. They prefer to threaten the institutions 
themselves.
  We have seen it in Presidential elections when Democrats say our 
democracy is sacrosanct when they win but illegitimate and broken if 
Republicans win.
  We have seen it with the Senate's rules. Democrats just spent 4 years 
not only praising but using the legislative filibuster. But now that 
they hold the majority, they say it has actually been intrinsically 
evil all along and must be scrapped.
  We are seeing it right now with voting regulations, where the mere 
fact that sometimes Republicans win elections has Democrats wanting to 
rewrite all 50 States' election laws right here in Washington and turn 
the Federal Election Commission into a partisan body.
  And then there is the judiciary. In recent years, we have seen the 
Democratic leader stand on the steps of the Court and threaten that 
specific Justices ``won't know what hit them'' if they didn't rule the 
way he wanted. We have seen a number of Democratic Senators send a 
threatening brief suggesting the Court might need to be 
``restructured'' if its rulings upset liberals.
  Last week, President Biden, who was marketed to the country as a 
moderate and institutionalist, jumped in with both feet. He set up a 
pseudo-academic commission to study the merits of packing the Supreme 
Court. It is just an attempt to clothe this transparent power play in 
fake legitimacy.
  But alas, the far left cannot even wait for the fake theatrics of the 
fake study to play out. Today, Democrats in the Senate and the House 
have announced they will once again threaten judicial independence from 
the steps of the Court. They are introducing a bill to add four new 
seats to the Supreme Court so that Democrats can pack the Court, 
destroy its legitimacy, and guarantee the rulings that liberals want.
  Across the ideological spectrum, top jurists have been outspoken on 
what a terrible idea Court packing would be. The late liberal icon, 
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, explicitly warned against Court packing saying: 
``If anything would make the Court appear partisan, it would be that.'' 
``Nine seems to be a good number''--Justice Ginsburg.
  Justice Stephen Breyer reaffirmed his own opposition just last week. 
The public, by the way, agrees. They see through this discredited 
concept. One survey late last year showed that a clear majority of 
Americans opposed packing the Supreme Court.
  But the farthest left activists aren't interested in the common good. 
They want power. And the same Democrats and the same corporate media 
that spent the last 4 years hyperventilating and declaring a new 
constitutional crisis was under way every 30 seconds seem to be 
perfectly content to play along.
  Now, if Republicans had introduced a bill to add four Supreme Court 
seats for the last President to fill, there would have been weeks of 
wall-to-wall outrage on every newspaper and cable TV channel nonstop. 
Now it seems the main strategies are either to shrug off, look the 
other way, or to actively play along and somehow lend credence.
  It is not about whether this insane bill becomes law. Part of the 
point here is the threats themselves. The left wants a sword dangling 
over the Justices when they weigh the facts in every case. As the 
Democratic leader threatened just 2 years ago, Democrats want the 
Justices to know that they will ``pay the price'' for rulings that 
Democrats don't like.
  The left wants these swords dangling over the Senate and State 
legislators and independent judges. The threats are the point. The 
hostage-taking is the point. And responsible people across the 
political spectrum have an absolute duty to denounce this.
  (The remarks of Mr. McConnell pertaining to the introduction of S. 
1133 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced 
Bills and Joint Resolutions.''

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