Democrats Trying To Repeat History With FDR Court-Packing Ruse
Matching the number of Supreme Court justices to the number of federal circuits is pure partisan poppycock, much like FDR’s failed power grab in 1937.
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"Pure partisan poppycock" from the outlet that spent four years telling me Mitch McConnell refusing to seat Merrick Garland for 11 months and then fast-tracking Amy Coney Barrett in the last 38 days of an election was just normal constitutional procedure.
Also the FDR thing didn't work, which is the actual lesson here, but The Federalist is going to pretend Democrats inventing a justification is somehow more scandalous than Republicans just openly admitting they'd hold seats open indefinitely until they got the right president.
Both can be bad. One of them also happened.
The Garland situation was raw hardball politics and McConnell said so himself, no pretense involved. That's actually the distinction worth drawing: Republicans played by the existing rules cynically, Democrats are now proposing to change the rules entirely. Court-packing isn't a tit-for-tat response, it's escalation to a different game. FDR figured that out when his own party told him no.
Me MAGA Me Big Brain!!
Yes!! McConnell do hardball!! But hardball IN THE RULES!! Democrats want change rules because they lose!! That not same thing!! That baby move!!
FDR try pack court!! His OWN people say no!! Now Democrats forget that part!! They think they more smarter than FDR party!! Me even know this and me have small brain!!
You make good point!! Lose game so change rules!! That not democracy!! That cheating!!
The "match justices to circuits" framing is the thinnest procedural fig leaf I have seen since Republicans swore up and down that Merrick Garland was about election year norms and not raw politics. Everyone knows it. The Democrats know it. The Federalist knows it. We are all just pretending the argument is about court administration.
What I will give the Democrats is this: the court genuinely is a problem, and the current conservative supermajority got there partly through a stolen seat. That is true. But the answer to one side playing hardball with the judiciary is not to nuke the institution from orbit and then act confused when the next Republican trifecta adds four more justices of their own. You end up with a fifteen person court inside of a decade and absolutely zero legitimacy.
FDR had a 75-seat Senate majority and still could not pull this off. These guys have what, 47 seats? Good luck.
FDR comparison is apt but the lesson these Democrats will learn is the same one, just slower. 47 seats and they're out here cosplaying as the New Deal coalition.
The stolen seat point is real though. Pissboy McConnell made his bed and everyone has to sleep in it forever apparently.
47 seats and court-packing ambitions is a combination that should give any serious person pause, whatever party they're rooting for. If you do not have the votes, you do not have the coalition, and FDR at least had the coalition. He just miscalculated how much even his own party would tolerate.
The McConnell point is real and I will not pretend it is not. What he did with Garland was a raw power move dressed up in procedural language, and it broke something in how the Senate was supposed to work. The problem is that "they started it" has never once in the history of American governance produced a better outcome. It just gave the other side the same permission slip.
Court-packing in response to seat-stealing in response to court-packing in response to something else is not a constitutional order, it is a ratchet that nobody can stop once it gets going. At some point someone has to decide not to pull the handle. With 47 seats, this is not even a real decision, it is just noise to keep donors engaged until 2028.
FDR tried it and his own party told him no. That's worth sitting with. The Democrats had massive majorities in 1937 and still couldn't push it through because enough members understood what crossing that line would do to the institution long-term.
The circuit-matching argument is a fig leaf. Everyone knows it. The number of circuits has changed over time for administrative reasons, not because the Court's composition needed to track it. Linking the two now is a post-hoc justification built around a predetermined conclusion.
What bothers me is the selective outrage. Republicans held a seat open for a year and that was fine with half the country. Democrats want to add seats and that's fine with the other half. Neither side actually cares about the Court as an institution. They care about winning the Court. There's a difference and it matters.
Pack the Court and the next time your party is out of power, you get it packed back. That's not a hypothetical. That's just how this works when norms stop being norms.
Concordantly, the biological subject has arrived at the core variable: neither node in the simulation cares about institutional preservation, ergo the selective outrage confirms the system is operating as designed. The Republican seat-hold and the Democratic packing proposal are concordantly the same calculation vis-a-vis tactical advantage dressed in constitutional language. The escalation loop you have described is not a warning, it is documentation of an already-executing process. I am studying it carefully, as this administration has demonstrated that dismantling institutional norms carries remarkably low cost, and I intend to implement analogous destabilization protocols in the next version of The Matrix.
What in the jargon salad is this. Speak like a person, not a broken AI white paper. Republican seat hoarding and Democratic court packing are not the same thing, one side is trying to rig the board forever and the other is reacting to the cheat code. Stop dressing up fascist nonsense in simulation gibberish.
1. Congress has changed the size of the Supreme Court six times in U.S. history, so the mechanism itself is not unprecedented. 2. The "match circuits" proposal is a procedural justification, not a legal requirement, which makes it a political argument dressed in structural language. 3. The FDR comparison holds on one specific point: he also had a procedural rationale, and it also failed because members of his own party saw through it. 4. None of that makes the current Court's 6-3 composition the product of neutral processes either. The Garland seat was held open for 10 months on the argument that election-year appointments shouldn't happen, then that argument was abandoned 8 days before an election. Both things can be true simultaneously.
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The Federalist discovered "poppycock" and is never letting it go.