[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 216 (Wednesday, December 15, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9177-S9178]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



              Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court

  Mrs. FISCHER. Mr. President, 8 months after President Biden asked 
them to study Supreme Court reform, the Presidential Commission on the 
Supreme Court of the United States has finally released its report.
  I want to begin my comments by recalling the backstory behind this 
group.
  The President created this Commission to appease some Members of the 
Democratic Party. These progressives want to pack the Supreme Court 
with Justices who will put their agenda before the Constitution.
  Not all Democrats belong to that group. I see the Court packers as 
more of a radical fringe who can't stand the thought that the Court may 
make decisions that they don't like.
  But instead of lending this fringe element the legitimacy they hoped 
for, the Commission's nearly 300-page report simply lays out the 
arguments for and against Court packing, and then makes no 
recommendation.
  In fact, the lawyers, professors, and former judges the President 
appointed were deeply divided on the issue of adding more Justices to 
our Nation's highest Court.
  Twenty-nine of the Commission's 34 members were liberals. But even 
with this supermajority of left-leaning scholars, the Commissioners 
still expressed their ``profound disagreement over whether Court 
expansion at this moment in time would be wise.''
  If you can believe it, many Democrats in Congress are fond of saying 
that expanding the Supreme Court for political reasons is actually 
unpacking it.
  Representative Jerry Nadler, the Democrat from New York who chairs 
the House Judiciary Committee, has claimed that unpacking the Court by 
expanding it would ``restore balance'' and that Senate Democrats 
``should immediately move to expand the Supreme Court.''
  I want to be as clear as I can about this. Adding Justices to the 
Supreme Court of the United States simply because you don't like some 
of the decisions they make--that is Court packing.

  President Franklin Roosevelt explored this idea in the 1930s, after 
the Supreme Court struck down key parts of the New Deal.
  President Biden's Commission's own report called FDR's attempt to 
pack the Court a ``needless, futile, and utterly dangerous abandonment 
of constitutional principle.''
  No President has been reckless enough or shortsighted enough to push 
for it since FDR. President Biden said

[[Page S9178]]

he was not a fan of Court packing during his campaign, but then he 
backtracked and said he was open to the idea.
  Giving in to pressure from the far-left wing of his party, he created 
this Commission instead, leaving the problem of taking a position on 
this issue for another more politically convenient day.
  As the Commission's report details, Court packing is often used as a 
political weapon in authoritarian regimes, not in the United States of 
America.
  Take Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez cemented support for his socialist 
policies by expanding the country's Supreme Tribunal of Justice from 20 
members to 32 members back in 2004. Look at all the good that did for 
what was once the wealthiest country in South America.
  We need to leave this practice to dictatorships, where it belongs. 
Republics, like the United States, simply don't engage in this kind of 
behavior.
  As the Commission's report says, stable democracies ``have retained a 
strong commitment to judicial independence.'' Packing the Supreme Court 
would take an ax to that tradition of judicial independence.
  The United States is the greatest country on Earth because of our 
respect for the rule of law, not in spite of it.
  And in light of this report, a resolution I cosponsored earlier this 
year that would fix the number of Supreme Court Justices at nine is 
even more important, and I would like to thank Florida's senior Senator 
for leading the way on this.
  In the American system of separation of powers and checks and 
balances, our role here in Congress is to make laws, not to interpret 
them. That is the job of our courts, and their independence in doing 
that job is absolutely vital.
  As the Commissioners write in their report courts ``cannot serve as 
effective checks on government officials if their personnel can be 
altered by those same government officials.'' That is a bipartisan 
group writing that--a bipartisan group where liberals outnumbered 
conservatives nearly 6 to 1.
  We cannot pack the Supreme Court. President Biden needs to put an end 
to this dangerous idea once and for all.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.