For the past several days, Joe Biden and his running-mate Kamala Harris have done some bobbing and weaving that would have made Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali quite proud in their heyday as championship-level heavyweight boxers.
Despite repeated questions about whether he would support adding more positions to the Supreme Court (and thus giving him the ability to nominate new judges for those positions, so as to alter the ideology of the Supreme Court to his views), Biden has refused to say what he would do.
Now, with his answer to a reporter Friday in Las Vegas, it is clear that Biden does not even believe the voters “deserve” to know what he would do on this highly critical issue, before the election. On Thursday, Biden had arrogantly said, “you’ll know my position on court-packing the day after the election.”
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In the Friday interview with a local reporter, Ross DiMattei of KTNV television asked the former vice president, “Sir, I’ve got to ask you about packing the courts,” to which Biden responded, “Sure.”
DiMattei then asked, “And I know that you said you weren’t going to answer the question until after the election, but this is the number one thing that I’ve been asked about from viewers in the past couple of days.”
One would think that if an issue was the number one issue that a reporter had been asked about by his viewers, a candidate would want to make his position on that “number one issue” quite clear. But Biden retorted, “Well, you’ve been asked by the viewers who are probably Republicans.”
That very statement is an indication of the contempt that Biden holds for those who do not share his political viewpoint, and is reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s condescending statement of dismissing Trump supporters as a “basketful of deplorables.” Biden said that these viewers, whose views are apparently irrelevant to him because they are “probably” Republicans, “don’t want me to continue to talk about what they’re doing to the court right now,” in an apparent reference to the nomination of Circuit Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
The reporter persisted, asking, “Well, sir, don’t the voters deserve to know —,” before Biden cut him off, saying, “No they don’t deserve.” (Emphasis added; see video below.)
Even Jake Tapper, the liberal reporter of CNN, has said, “Biden and Harris should answer it.” David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama agreed, saying, “They should’ve had a better answer than the non-answer [Harris] gave.”
Bluntly put, what “packing” the Supreme Court means is that were the Democrats to win control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they would proceed to increase the number of Supreme Court justices from its present nine to a number that would give a President Biden the opportunity to name enough justices to tilt the Court to the views of the Democratic Party majority. This would mean a gutting of the principles of separation of powers and checks and balances, which were deliberately placed into the Constitution by the Framers of the Constitution.
When President Franklin Roosevelt tried to “pack” the Court in 1937 after he had won re-election, angry that the Supreme Court had declared some of his laws that Congress had passed as unconstitutional, even Democrats couldn’t stand for it. Despite the Democrats holding a majority of 76-16 in the Senate, that body rejected the proposal by a vote of 70-20.
The overwhelmingly Democratic-run Senate Judiciary Committee of 1937 declared, “we would rather have an independent Court” than one which would meekly approve of “any measure we may enact.” They added, “We are not above the Constitution.”
As Hugh Hewitt recently wrote in The Washington Post, “Expanding the Supreme Court is the most radical proposal of them all, and Biden refuses to say whether he’s for it or against it.”
Hewitt added, “Court-packing is a threat to the Supreme Court and thus to every American freedom, especially religious liberty, the Second Amendment and property rights, and the separation of powers fundamental to our republic’s durability. The Biden-Harris ticket and every Democratic Senate candidate should publicly condemn the idea or be rejected by the voters.”
While there are many important issues to be decided in the presidential race, this subversive scheme to pack the Supreme Court threatens the very foundations of our political system. Yet, Joe Biden believes the voters do not even deserve to know his position on it.
