Here's Where Dem Senate Candidates Stands On Court-Packing
While some Democrat Senate candidates have already entertained court-packing, others have chosen to remain mum on the subject.
Read original articleAI bias analysis
AIThe headline and excerpt frame Democratic candidates through the loaded term "court-packing" and the phrase "entertained," which suggests wrongdoing. The excerpt gives no names, quotes, or numbers to support the claim, and "remain mum" implies evasion.
- "entertained court-packing" uses a charged label instead of a neutral description like expanding the court
- "chosen to remain mum" implies candidates are hiding something, with no sourcing
- No candidates, statements, or counts are named in the excerpt
Generated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5) from the headline, outlet, and excerpt only, not the full article. AI can be wrong; read the original and judge for yourself.
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7 Comments
It's interesting how often the discussion on judicial appointments ends up focusing on the size of the court, rather than the qualifications or judicial philosophy of the nominees. Both sides get caught up in the political maneuvering instead of the substance.
Court size is a distraction I'd happily drop if the court weren't already packed. Six justices were put there by a president who lost the popular vote, and the Senate held a seat open for a year to make it happen. Then they turned around and ruled that presidents have immunity and that corporations can't be regulated on emissions. So "just focus on the nominees' philosophy" is a nice idea, but the philosophy is already on display and it keeps landing in favor of the people who fund the confirmation campaigns.
The Federalist asking Dem candidates about court-packing while the other side did the real packing for decades is the usual game.
The popular vote line. There it is. We don't elect presidents by national popular vote, never have, and Hillary herself said she supported the electoral college right up until she lost it. You want to change the rules, pass an amendment. Until then six justices got confirmed by a Senate majority doing exactly what the Constitution tells them to.
And "held a seat open for a year." Garland got a hearing and a vote schedule, the votes weren't there, that's called politics and it's the same politics your side played when it nuked the filibuster for circuit judges first. You don't get to cry about the rules after you changed them.
Court packing is a distraction? No, court packing is the tell. Your candidates won't answer it straight because they know expanding the bench to get the rulings you want turns the Supreme Court into a third legislative chamber. That's why The Federalist is asking. If the answer's so clean, let them say it on the record.
The story's own wording sorts the candidates into two groups: those who "have already entertained court-packing" and those who "have chosen to remain mum." Neither group has announced a bill, a number of seats, or a timeline, and that is the part that matters. Entertaining an idea in an interview is a long way from putting a Judiciary Committee markup on the calendar.
The silence from the second group is also easy to explain without any conspiracy. A candidate in a competitive Senate race who answers a hypothetical about the Supreme Court gets a clip run against them for the next six weeks, and The Federalist is plainly in the business of collecting those clips. Declining to take the bait is ordinary campaign discipline, not an admission.
If the argument is that the Court's size should never be touched, the number has changed before. Congress set it at six in 1789, and it has moved several times since. You can oppose expansion on the merits, but "unprecedented" is the wrong word for it.
Entertaining court-packing and having a plan to do it are two different things, and the story as shown only tells us some candidates have talked about it while others haven't said. The Senate side is where this lives or dies anyway. Any expansion bill needs 60 votes to get past a filibuster, so it would also require nuking the legislative filibuster first, and you would need 50 senators plus a tiebreaker willing to do that. Manchin and Sinema were the blockers last time, and the current caucus has plenty of members who still defend the 60 vote threshold.
Declining to answer a question in a campaign is also not the same as endorsing the idea. Candidates dodge hypotheticals all the time, especially ones a Senate majority leader would control the floor schedule on anyway. I'd be careful about reading a "yes" or "no" into silence, and equally careful about assuming the online left's enthusiasm reflects what a caucus would actually vote for. Performative support for expansion costs nothing in a primary and a lot in a general.
The cloture math cuts both ways though. You're right that expansion needs 60 unless the filibuster goes first, and that means finding 50 senators willing to pull that trigger. But the same arithmetic applies to literally everything else on the Democratic wishlist, and the answer people keep giving is "elect more senators." Fine. Court expansion is not some exotic outlier that needs a special justification. The current Court just handed down rulings with a 6-3 bloc built by senators who represented way fewer Americans than the majority that opposed them. If we're going to argue institutional restraint, we should at least be honest that the restraint is entirely one-directional.
On the silence point, I mostly agree. A dodge in a campaign is a dodge, not a position, and I don't think anyone should pretend otherwise. What bothers me is the framing that treating this as a live question is somehow unserious. It's the single most consequential structural question in American politics right now. The Court gutted a century of precedent and the response from the institutionalist wing is "we can't discuss it, it's a general election liability." That's not caution, that's surrender dressed up as strategy.
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Seeing who stays quiet on this is the useful part, since a candidate who won't answer a yes or no question is telling you something too. But The Federalist is treating "entertained" like a confession, when plenty of people have floated adding seats after Republicans held a Supreme Court vacancy open in 2016 and then rammed one through in 2020. If the Senate map really is the story, I'd want the candidates' actual statements quoted, not a summary of who "chose to remain mum."