In the wake of the most conservative Supreme Court term in living memory, capped by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the drumbeats for court-packing in leftist circles have increased again. The Left claims Republicans stole the seat that should have gone to now-Attorney General Merrick Garland and defied the sainted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying wish that President Joe Biden name her successor, so political payback is justified.
What liberals want — when they’re not demonstrating in front of justices’ homes or hounding them at dinner — is for Congress to rectify the court’s supposed illegitimacy by adding progressive jurists. But in doing so, they ignore the lesson of the last serious push for expanding the court for political purposes, instigated by their patron saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt . FDR’s court-packing scheme was not only a spectacular failure but quickly proved unnecessary.
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner