Dan McLaughlin writes for National Review Online about an unconvincing endorsement of a bad idea from Vice President Kamala Harris.
Jonathan Chait, having commited himself to the notion that the Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are actually friends of constitutional democracy and the rule of written law, has to explain away the most menacing aspect of the authoritarian and lawless Harris record: her endorsement of the Biden Court-packing plan, coming as it does after she outright endorsed expanding the Supreme Court in 2019.
If this proposal came from the right (see the reaction to what Benjamin Netanyahu proposed to change Israel’s court system), Chait would be shrieking with alarm. But defend it he does, in an article titled “In Defense of the Biden-Harris Plan to Reform, Not Pack, the Courts.”
Chait effectively acknowledges that the Biden-Harris plan is unconstitutional, which he treats as a good thing: “The whole thing is almost certain to be struck down by the Supreme Court.” But he doesn’t say why. A reader of his piece will not even be introduced to the two biggest problems with the Sheldon Whitehouse–led effort that Biden and Harris have endorsed: It would attempt to eliminate constitutionally mandated life tenure by passing a statute, and (in order to have the desired effect of removing the current majority) it would apply retroactively, to throw three sitting justices (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts) off the Court.
The notion that we should rest easy at Harris’s pledge to violate the Constitution because the Court would stop her is not reassuring — especially given that, if a plan is passed and goes all the way to the Court for decision, we can expect a sustained campaign from the White House to delegitimize the Court (or rather an escalation of the campaign already being run by Whitehouse, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Ed Markey, Ron Wyden, and other Senate Democrats) and, most likely, an effort to intimidate the justices by rallying the sort of mass protests that Netanyahu’s opponents deployed in the spring of 2023.
