Life has been good for the Second Amendment lately. Sure, there are state-level setbacks, but the Supreme Court issued two key rulings in favor of gun rights, agreed to take what may become one of the most important cases on guns since the Second Amendment was ratified, and the Department of Justice is proverbially kicking in doors to defend gun rights for a change.
It’s not a bad time to be alive, really.
And that’s why, it seems, Democrats have decided that since they can’t win on the merits of constitutional arguments, they just need to play a little Calvinball and change the rules until they can win.
Rep. Jayapal: Court packing is “absolutely” being discussed
According to a news alert from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, that’s exactly what anti-gun lawmakers are trying to do. Citing a report at Breitbart.com, NSSF wrote that U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Washington, has made it clear that expanding and overhauling the nation’s highest court to bend to an anti-gun agenda, through a scheme known as SCOTUS court packing, is “absolutely” in play.
Jayapal made the remarks when she appeared on MS NOW’s “On The Line,” when she was asked by host Alicia Menendez, “Before I let you go real quick, you’ve advocated for expanding the court from 9 to 13 seats. Is that now a conversation that is happening inside the caucus?”
Jayapal’s reply told us all we need to know about what anti-gun Democrats are working toward in hopes of getting some future court decisions for their side.
“Absolutely it is. Absolutely,” she said. “I mean, look, we need a Supreme Court that is not beholden to corporate interests to any president, but is actually willing to interpret the law and not reinterpret it and revisit settled decisions. And this court has shown over and over again that it is incapable of doing that.”
In other words, everything was chill when they were winning most cases because of leftist judges and soft-willed conservatives, but now that the tide has turned, everything has to be thrown up in the air until they get the results they want.
It’s also why they oppose election integrity laws, when you think about it. It’s why they want to abolish the electoral college every time it works against them.
Still, we’re talking about gun rights, and this is definitely something that people like Jayapal want to happen, in part because they keep getting their posteriors handed to them over Second Amendment issues.
To be fair, the Constitution doesn’t set the size of the Supreme Court. The Founding Fathers probably should have said, “It’ll have seven justices and no more without an amendment,” but they didn’t. Congress determines the size, so court packing can, theoretically, happen.
What people like Jayapal don’t seem to understand is that no matter what they do with the Supreme Court, it can either be done by Republicans or undone by them. What keeps the number firm is a combination of tradition and mutually assured destruction. It’s been at nine since 1869, and that’s a comfortable number by most people’s standards, so why change it now?
Then there’s the fact that what you’ll end up with is a back-and-forth between Republican and Democrat majorities changing the Court in order to get rulings more in line with their own beliefs.
Or, as is more likely the case, Jayapal is using the threat of court packing like President Franklin Roosevelt used it during the Great Depression. He used the threat to pressure justices into upholding his blatantly unconstitutional New Deal policies. It worked then, and Jayapal and her fellow Democrats are hoping it will again.
But that was then. This is the Trump era, and you’d better believe that pro-gun Republican voters are going to let the GOP get away with doing nothing should Democrats act on the threats. We like winning in the courts, after all, and while that won’t continue forever because someone’s going to retire at a bad time, or die unexpectedly, and the balance will shift, just like it did when Justice Ginsburg passed away, but we’ll take what we can get, and we’re not going to stand aside and be railroaded.
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