October 9, 2020
If it was attention Joe Biden was trying to avoid, he failed. “You’ll know my opinion on court packing when the election is over,” the former vice president said, standing in an airplane hanger with his running-mate. “You know the moment I answer that question, the headline in every one of your papers will be about that.” Turns out, they were all about that anyway, because his massive dodge is making the American people worry a lot more about what Joe Biden isn’t saying than what he is.
“I’ll be happy to lay down in detail what I’m going to do after [the election].” In other words, when it’s too late. Sort of like the 2020 version of “you have to vote for it to find out what’s in it.” But on something as fundamental as burning down our co-equal branches of government and rebooting America as an activist oligarchy, even Democratic voters aren’t going to be quite so enthusiastic In a pair of new polls, most people are not only against expanding the number of justices, they also think Amy Coney Barrett should be confirmed! In a sure sign that the Left is losing the messaging war, Morning Consult warns, support for the president’s nominee jumped 10 points among Democrats over the last week — and nine points total.
Just as significant, at least to people who care about the last 240 years of constitutional governance, is Biden’s refusal to be forthcoming on his stand on the Senate filibuster. That too, the presidential candidate said, would “depend.” Every position he’s taken over the past 47 years now seems to “depend.” In this case, Andrew McCarthy warns, the filibuster, we’re talking about wiping every minority party power of objection. “If that were done, the entire Democratic Party agenda could be imposed with the signature of the new Democratic administration.” This is the minefield Biden is walking with the radical Left. They aren’t interested in a “timid” agenda, Michael Daughtery points out. “The Left wants de-Trumpification, and they will steal Joe Biden’s electoral mandate for themselves.”
In the case of one of America’s most important (and volatile) institutions — the Supreme Court — that’s a dangerous proposition. “Their message is shameless,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Nebr.) insists. “‘Give us what we want, or we’ll blow up the court!’ This is the ugly consequence,” he said, “of politicians treating the Supreme Court like a Super-Congress instead of a fair and dispassionate court.” Even the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose death the Left is supposedly attempting to avenge, was clear in 2019 that neither side should try to change the status quo. “Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time. I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.”
And yet, Sasse shakes his head, this is how “in line” Harris is, in particular, with the woke Left. They want “to make the Supreme Court 13 or 15 people to import some of the craziest radical ideas… into our jurisprudence,” he argued on “Washington Watch.” We’re talking about a full-scale war on “the First Amendment, on religious liberty, on free speech and free assembly. And I think that’s the number one issue on the ballot November 3rd. And it’s why maintaining a majority in the U.S. Senate [makes this] the most important election before us.”
At the end of the day, no matter how many times Joe Biden assures Americans otherwise, this would be Kamala Harris’s administration. They’ve both said as much — accidentally or not. So while he may play coy with the “suburban wine moms,” as Doughterty calls them, she feels no such compulsion. “In the primaries,” he reminds everyone, “Biden ran against constitutional extremism. During the debates, Kamala Harris laughed in his face when he cited the constitutional limits on the executive branch. He said during the primary that Democrats would ‘rue the day’ they packed Supreme Court.” If they are elected, she will laugh in the face of our separation of powers, our Constitution, our very rule of law.
“Court packing would douse these last rule-of-law embers. It would be an unambiguous, despotic act of directing the judiciary to decide cases politically — and, naturally, in accordance with the political preferences of the radicals who expanded the bench for that explicit purpose. And that would just be the start of the radical coup, not the end. That’s the agenda Joe Biden and Kamala Harris avoid talking about…”
But it’s an agenda that the American people deserve to know. And if they won’t explain it, we will. Take the time to read through FRC Action’s “What Biden and Harris Would Do on Our Issues.” Then, check out Ken Blackwell’s new column in the American Thinker, “C’mon, Man: Biden Must Answer Court-Packing Question.”
Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.