Author Topic: Stephen Breyer Makes the Liberal Case Against Court Packing  (Read 62 times)

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Offline Kamaji

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Stephen Breyer Makes the Liberal Case Against Court Packing
« on: February 22, 2022, 04:07:53 pm »
Stephen Breyer Makes the Liberal Case Against Court Packing

"Think long and hard," Breyer warns would-be court packers, "before embodying those changes in law."

By Damon Root
From the March 2022 Issue

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court told President George W. Bush that fighting a global war on terrorism did not entitle him to evade constitutional limits on his authority. That decision, Boumediene v. Bush, would go down in the books as one of the most significant modern rulings against wartime government power. "We'll abide by the Court's decision," Bush said. "That doesn't mean I have to agree with it."

What if Bush did not abide by the Court's decision? What if he said the Court was dead wrong and his administration would not be bound by its erroneous judgment? What if subsequent presidents followed Bush's lead and ignored the judicial branch whenever their own favored policies happened to lose in federal court?

Such counterfactual scenarios are the driving force behind Justice Stephen Breyer's timely and important new book, The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics (Harvard). The 83-year-old Supreme Court justice is well aware that many modern liberals want President Joe Biden to pack the Court with new members for the express purpose of creating a new liberal supermajority. Breyer thinks those court packers are being both dimwitted and shortsighted. "Think long and hard," Breyer warns them, "before embodying those changes in law."

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Let history be our guide. President Andrew Jackson flatly ignored the Supreme Court's 1832 decision in Worcester v. Georgia, which affirmed Cherokee control over Cherokee territory. Jackson defied the ruling by sending federal troops to forcibly remove the Cherokee people from their territory via the infamous Trail of Tears. The rule of law suffers when the political branches ignore the judiciary's judgment. People suffer too.

Breyer worries that today's liberal court packers could severely weaken judicial authority and pave the way for the next Andrew Jackson. "Whether particular decisions are right or wrong," Breyer writes, "is not the issue here." The issue "is the general tendency of the public to respect and follow judicial decisions, a habit developed over the course of American history." One of court packing's biggest dangers is that it will undermine that general tendency.

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Source:  https://reason.com/2022/02/22/stephen-breyer-makes-the-liberal-case-against-court-packing-2/