How Democrats and dark money are plotting to blow up the Supreme CourtBy Sen. Mike Lee
June 9, 2022
After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump, Brian Fallon needed a job. Fallon had served as Clinton’s national press secretary during the campaign, and before that he had done the same job for my colleague Chuck Schumer in the Senate. For a while, his reputation around Washington, DC, was stellar. He was, according to a lengthy profile in the Daily Beast, “one of the most sought-after operatives in Democratic politics: a brass-knuckle brawler with experience at the highest levels of government, a cellphone filled with the top journalists in town, and a reputation for being preternaturally on message.”
But something changed in Fallon after Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. He became less interested in traditional politics, giving up a role as a commentator on CNN, and more interested in ways of putting pressure on Democrats to take radical action.
By 2018, two years into President Trump’s first term, Fallon and his friends in Democratic politics had seen some of their party’s core ideas repudiated time and time again at the ballot box. They had lost the game of electoral politics. So, they figured, they would change the rules of the game to give themselves a better chance of winning.
In 2018, urged by liberal political consultants such as John Podesta, Fallon started Demand Justice, a group whose mission, at least on its face, was to stop President Trump from making more judicial appointments. After two years in the White House, President Trump had already nominated a record number of judges to the federal bench, and he wasn’t slowing down.
But soon, other, more radical ideas began taking over — one in particular.
In October of 2018, following the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, academics Mark Tushnet and Laurence Tribe announced their support for the “1.20.21 Project,” which aimed to pack four additional justices onto the Supreme Court following their hoped-for inauguration of a Democrat president that year. They made no secret of the partisan nature of the project, claiming they were acting in response to “Republican obstruction, theft and procedural abuse” in the judicial system.
The idea still isn’t in the mainstream yet. At the time, even The Associated Press described Tribe and Tushnet as “a couple of liberal Harvard law professors.”
But like a virus infecting a new host, the Court-packing plan became more powerful when it entered the political bloodstream. As Democrats geared up for their 2020 presidential primary, Demand Justice and other groups like it, such as Take Back the Court and Indivisible, began floating the idea of Court packing as a response to President Trump’s judicial nominations. They also began ranking lawmakers on how opposed they were to President Trump’s nominees, grading them on a scale of A, meaning they had supported zero of the judges that President Trump had nominated, to F, which meant that they had supported some.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2022/06/09/how-democrats-and-dark-money-are-plotting-to-blow-up-the-supreme-court/
