A New Court Packing Scheme from the Dems

Ron Wyden, Democrat from Oregon. And let's be clear, the person who's created the environment for something like this to be proposed is Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden both sort of announced their support for a court packing plan of Biden's devising in the weeks when Biden, right after the debate, Biden was flailing. He was trying to do something to shore up his extreme left wing of support, and he threw out this proposal for quote, reforming the

Supreme Court. This proposal basically to have eighteen year term limits for Supreme Court justices and every two years for a president to be able to appoint someone to the court. So nine justices each with eighteen year term limits. Every two years, someone would roll off the court. The big question that Biden was dodging, answering that Harris is dodging answering. You know, it's amazing how much stuff Harris doesn't have

to answer for. Is what to do about the justices on the court right now who have already been on the court for more than eighteen years, or the existing justices, how their time on the court is going to work, particularly given the three justices who've been serving for more than three years are Sam Alito, who I believe was appointed in two thousand and five, two thousand and six, something like that, John Roberts who was a little bit before him, and then Clarence Thomas was appointed I believe

in nineteen ninety one, in the early nineties. So three Republican appointees are over the eighteen year limit. What do we do with them? Presumably they'd be retroactively kicked off the court. I think that's part of what Harris and Biden want. They realize adding more seats maybe that's too extreme. So here's a system to get hurry these conservative justices

off the court. And they're doing it out of some purported as, Oh, we need to perform the Supreme Court, Supreme Court, it's s troubled by ethical scandals from Justice as Thomas. There's no ethical scandals. These are blowney ethical scandals where, yeah, Clarence Thomas is hanging out with a rich guy and flying on his private jet, a rich guy who has no business before the court, who has not had any business before the court. You're allowed to

do that. I don't know, I mean, it just seems to me bizarre that we're making this huge ordeal over Clarence Thomas hanging out with rich people, as if Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't, as if all these other liberal Supreme Court justices didn't do the exact same thing, which most of them did. But we breathlessly report on stuff like this, which isn't really necessarily an ethical violation at all, but

only when conservative justices do it anyway. So Harris has one supported this idea of screwing around with membership of the Supreme Court in order to attain a more ideologically favorable position for liberals. She wants to do something to shove the conservative justices off the Supreme Court. And we all know for a fact, if liberals had a majority on the Supreme Court, right now. Harris would not be promoting these policies. It's not like she cares about some

value neutral concept of the Supreme Court. Oh, we really do need term limits for Supreme Court justice. Liberals were totally fine with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices when they fundamentally controlled it for the last seventy years. So Harris has created this environment with her own proposal for sort of messing around with the Supreme Court a very questionable const constitutionality, as well as her openness to breaking

the filibuster. So the only way a proposal like that's going to work is if you can abolish the filibuster rule in the Senate. The philibuster rule in the Senate is basically debate in the Senate can theoretically go on forever. One can filibuster a bill to death, so effectively to advance a lot of most kinds of legislation in the Senate, you actually need sixty out of one hundred votes rather than fifty one out of one hundred votes. Harris has announced she is in favor of using the filibuster at

least for certain things. So here's the bill that Ron Wyden has proposed for the Supreme Court, and I think we need to ask every single Democrat running in a competitive race what they think about it. His proposal includes increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court by six, mandating yearly irs audits for each Supreme Court justice, requiring a ruling by two thirds of the Supreme Court and the Circuit Courts of Appeals to overturn a law passed

by Congress rather than a simple court majority. To expand the number of federal judicial circuits in the United States from thirteen they're thirteen judicial circuits currently to fifteen, also adding more than one hundred district court judges and more than sixty appellate level judges. Weaken the Senate's power of advice and consent by requiring Supreme Court nominees to be automatically scheduled for a vote if their nominations stall in committee.

So that this is wild. This is a wild proposal. Harris's existing proposal is already wild. Harris's proposal for term limits on Supreme Court justices that's wild in the sense that it's probably unconstitutional. The Constitution itself says in Article three that justices of the Supreme Court and the judges appointed to any inferior courts that Congress may create in the future enjoy that can exercise their office quote in good behavior. And what that means, what that has always meant,

That has always been interpreted to mean. That effectively means lifetime tenure. Okay, you keep your office as long as you're as long as you're in good behavior. The only way to remove a Supreme Court justice or any other Article three federal judge. So that the different kinds of federal judges. You've got Supreme Court justices at the tippy top,

the nine Supreme Court justices. You've got the judges for the thirteen different federal circuit courts, so the first Circuit, second Circuit, third Circuit, fourth or blah blah blah blah blah, the DC Circuit, and then you have the federal district courts. Those are the trial level judges in the federal system. So those are sort of the three levels. All of those judges enjoy lifetime tenure, and that's baked into the

Constitution itself. So the current Harris Biden proposal to limit the terms of office for Supreme Court justices to only eighteen years, but then after you're done with eighteen years, you get to go be a circuit court judge. Well, that's infringing on the constitution. Okay, the Constitution says you

get to exercise this office for good behavior. The only way you can remove a federal district court judge, a circuit court judge, or Supreme Court justice from their office is through the impeachment and removal process, like the same process for you know, impeaching and removing a president. A majority of the House of Representatives has to impeach you, and then a two thirds vote of the United States

Senate has to remove you from office. The only time that's ever happened to federal judges has been with federal judges who've been found to have been accepting bribes or committing some other kind of crime. Outside of impeachment and removal, which is provided for in the Constitution, federal judges enjoy lifetime tenure, and they enjoy lifetime tenure in that office. By the way, So for Congress to try to pass a law, which is what Harris and Biden are proposing,

just to eighteen years and you're done. No, that's ridiculous. That infringes on you know, one of the things the Constitution's really big on is if someone's got a job legally granted to them and you take away that job, that's a problem. That's like a legal problem that can

be vindicated by law. So the idea of a Supreme Court saying that, oh, this doesn't violate the Constitution in lifetime tenure, because yes, the Supreme Court justice only can serve eighteen years and then they have to leave that job, but they still enjoy lifetime tenure because they're still a Circuit Court judge. Well, no, you have lifetime tenure for that job. Being on the Supreme Court's a bigger deal. Now. The Ron Widen's bill, the Senator from Oregon is far

more extreme even than what Harris and Biden have initially proposed. Again, just flat out adding six more justices, not futzing around futs futz, not anything worse, FCC, it's all right, futson around with you know, term limits or age restrictions or anything like that. Now six more justices yearly, So six more justices. That is one thing Congress could actually do by statute. The number of justices on the Supreme Court

is not actually set by the Constitution. Congress can simply pass a law to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court if they want to. Now, we've held ever since FDR tried to do this in nineteen thirty six, and his own party said, no, this is tyrannical, this is way too extreme, this is you interfering in the judicial branch. We should never do something like this again. And everyone accepted that conventional wisdom until five minutes ago.

That is actually something Congress could do. It's a terrible idea, but it is something Congress could do. Harass the justice with mandatory yearly irs audits. I don't know that that might be like one branch of government unduly interfering in another. I think that could raise some problems with the independence of the judiciary. Require a ruling by two thirds of the Supreme Court and the circuit courts of Appeals to

overturn a law passed by Congress. This is another provision of Senator Ron Wyden's bill for packing the Supreme Court, but also saying that two thirds of the Supreme Court and the circuit courts of Appeals would be required to overturn any law passed by Congress. I mean this undercuts the entire system of judicial review. I don't know how this is possible. I guess I'm not sure to say it's unconstitutional zone. I mean, it's almost like leading us

into completely different constitutional waters. The idea of being the Supreme Court would no longer be actually the final court of appeals. It would be the Supreme Court plus the circuit courts in conjunction. I think it's kind of fundamentally reshaping the whole structure of Article three of our federal court system as a whole. It's reshaping the whole nature of the Supreme Court. I don't know that that's really feasible under the Constitution without doing this as a constitutional amendment.

Expanding the number of federal judicial circuits from thirteen to fifteen, Okay, Congress could do that by a statute, but again, this is court packing. You're gonna the only reason they want to increase the number of circuits is so that here's a whole bunch of new judge ships that President Harris gets to a point, adding more than one hundred district court judges and more than sixty appellate level judges. So Democrats can stack the federal bench with unfit radical with

more unfit radicals. Yeah. I mean, that's the point of this is. This is beyond packing the Supreme Court. They want to pack all the circuit courts and the district courts as well. They want to create new seats and just fill them all with Democrats. And then lastly, I think this is another unconstitutional provision. We can the Senate's power of advice and consent by requiring Supreme Court nominees to be automatically scheduled for a vote if their nominations

stolen committee. So the Constitution says, the President nominates judges federal judges, the Senate has its process of advice and consent. The Senate's process of advice and consent. The way that the Senate has has devised this is the Senate Judiciary Committee reviews nominees for federal judge ships. That's where they have their hearings, where they talk with the judge individually. That's where they have open hearings. They have a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and then they have a

vote on the floor of the Senate. So I guess this probably wouldn't actually be unconstitutional. It would be Congress itself, limiting the nature of the Senate's power of advice and consent. But it seems as though this is the Merrick Garland provision. This is the We're mad that Merrick Garland didn't get a vote in committee. It didn't get a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee when President Obama nominated him after

after Justice Scalia died in February of twenty sixteen. So we're going to put this provision in because it would have required that Merrick Garland get you know, an up and down vote from the floor of the Senate, even if his you know, even though his committee hearing didn't happen. This is an insane proposal, Okay, I mean as insane as the Biden Harris proposal. It's already on the books that like, this is their proposal, This is what Biden

Harris support. This bill by Senator Widen is far crazier, far more disastrous, far more meddlesome to our constitutional order, equally as unconstitutional, I'd say, And I think it's this. I think it's a gift. I think every Senator in a battleground state, every Democrat senator candidate in a battleground state, needs to be asked whether they support it or not. Kamala Harris needs to be asked she supports it. Tim

Walls needs to be asked if he supports it. When we return, we will dig into this and how disruptive to the constitutional order it is next on the John Gerardi Show. Since Trump kind of entered the political scene, there's been a lot of ink spilled and a lot of yapping done about violations of political norms. How Trump has violated this political norm of that political that this is disruptive to our republic, blah blah blah blah blah

blah blah. The apex of this was January sixth, and the idea that Trump was pursuing this certain reading of federal election legislation about the vice president's role with regards to certifying the electoral college count and urging Vice President Pence to not certify the electoral college count, and this one interpretation of federal law basically to argue that the vice president sort of had this unilateral power, which I

think a lot of people would. He did have a legitimate, real legal expert advising him on it, who was not a schmuck by any stretch. John Eastman, who was proponsing this. I think most everyone left end right kind of think Eastman was wrong. I think it's kind of a crazy argument to make that a sitting vice president can just unilaterally reject certifying the electoral college as he or she wishes.

That would, you know, especially under our current system with the president and the vice president always being of the same party, which was not the original structure of the constitution necessarily no, that would You could almost guarantee that an incumbent could never lose an election off his own his or her own vice president had this unilateral authority

to accept or reject electoral count certification. So that would be a real structural problem constitutionally, if Trump's interpretation of that were so. Nonetheless, Trump was trying to get Mike Pence not to certify the election results. That was seen as the greatest single example of Trump threatening the constitutional order, which is amusing because I think if the riot had not actually occurred on January sixth, no one would think of that act as being particularly threatening. I don't know.

It seems like the riot that happened on January sixth was one thing. Trump's pressuring of Pence not to certify the election results on January sixth was kind of another thing. It just sort of seems like the two got one conflated with each other when Jack Smith could not actually

connect them to each other. Notice when Jack Smith charged Donald Trump with stuff surrounding January sixth, he didn't actually charge him with anything having to do with the violent condoct ud by you know, the rioters on January sixth, The people, the people actually doing bad stuff, the people who were you know, vandalizing stuff, fighting with police officers, those guys not you know mem who not not the Memas and the paw pawse who were waved through by

security and walked into the you know areas, walked into Congress and said oh that's interesting, and then walked out. And then all of a sudden, the dj is aggressively

prosecuting them for basically for a kind of trespassed crime. Anyway, for all the ink spilled about what a threat to the constitutional order, President Trump represents the way that we casually skate by Kamala Harris saying I want to propose court packing by another means I want to propose via legislation something that almost certainly you could only do by a constitutional amendment to kick Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and John Roberts off the Court as soon as I can,

and just to reshape the court, to get rid of its current conservative majority, to put in a majority of my preference. And no one finds this to be the grave threat to the constitutional order that I think it clearly is. It's clearly a threat to the constitutional order if presidents are if presidents working with Congress can just reshape the judiciary to their liking with a snap of a finger, then it's going to lead to massive instability. It's a it's a huge flaw in the constitutional order.

I think the very fact that Congress could really I think it is a flaw inherent than our constitutional order, that Congress can just pass a law to increase the number of justices. I think that's something that should be

corrected via a constitutional amendment. If we actually want stability there and to take away the possibility for an aggressive president plus Congress to reshape the judiciary at a whim, we should actually try to pursue a constitutional amendment saying the number of justices on the Supreme Court is set at nine. They have lifetime ten years, you know, clarify that you can't do all these shenanigans that that Vice

President Harris is proposing, that Ron Wyden is proposing. But furthermore, I think the constitutional safeguards we do have for lifetime appointment of justices, Harris wants to just blow past it, you know, with this idea of her idea of eighteen year term limits. Eighteen year term limits, which blatantly violate it's the provision with an Article three the federal judges serve during good behavior. That means for life. That means as long as they're not impeached and removed, they get

to keep serving. It's a real, real sorry, I'm going through puberty on the radio. It's a real serious attack on our constitutional order that she's just flatly openly making. And the media is all pretending like it's normal because they want her to win, because they hate the current makeup of the Supreme Court. That's all it is. Nobody on the left is applying any kind of value neutral analysis to ask like, is this structurally a good idea

for the Supreme Court. Yeah, I know, we don't like the current makeup of the Supreme Court, but maybe Let's think about this with the lens of decades rather than the lens of right now of being mad about something that happened. In being mad that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had the bad luck to die in September of twenty twenty rather than February of twenty twenty one when I return, How do people pick politicians? How do we self select

for such terrible people to run for office? Next on the John Girardi Show, it's Friday, so you'll permit me to have a bit more of a discursive little ramble of a radio segment here, I'm wondering how it is that we self select for our politicians. What is the mindset that pushes someone to run for office? What is the mindset that convinces people to put people forward during primaries? What is the mindset that convinces people to vote for people?

And I've got a lot of different sort of politicians I'm putting in different categories for how I'm thinking about this. So there's the we don't like this guy, but he's got our team's flag on him, so we're just gonna vote for him. I think the best example of that is Tim Walls. So everything I hear from my wife's relatives who are who live in Minnesota. So my mother in law and father in law, whom I love dearly. By the way, it's an underrated thing to really genuinely

love your in laws, and I really genuinely do. I love my in laws. I think they're wonderful people. In addition to raising the most wonderful woman in the whole world, they are also incredibly nice, kind, good fun people to hang around. And anyway, I could go on and on about how much I love my mother in law my father in law. Now this is not what the segment's about. Anyway. Talking with my in laws and other people I know from Minnesota, they always talk about nobody likes Tim Walls.

Nobody likes Tim Walls, and he was so terrible during the twenty twenty right and everyone's burning stuff down. And when we go to the Minnesota State Fair, the stopped him Walls booth whatever, the Republican But the line is going out the door blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, And I'm like, yeah, I mean, my observation as an outsider is like, well, how unpopular is he? I mean,

he got elected in twenty eighteen. They had all the riots in Minneapolis in twenty twenty and all the post George Floyd's stuff, and you re elected him after that in twenty twenty two fairly comfortably, and a lot of this unsavory stuff we see about him, it is showing. I mean, I think people are more and more seeing he's he's kind of a phony. I mean, it's not like the Liberals are putting him for it as like this is our liberal answer to the masculinity problems that

we have. That Okay, men are driving, men are leaving the Democratic Party in hoardes, especially young men. Harris is really turning off male voters. So here's Tim Walls. Here's our answer. Here's our liberal vision of what it means to be a real man wears flannel and stuff like that. And the vibe I get from people in Minnesota is just the lack of enthusiasm. It's not like Walls is this wildly popular liberal governor. He just isn't. He's not

this kind of figure. I mean, he didn't have the kind of enthusiasm behind him certainly that Barack Obama did in two thousand. In sort of that two thousand and four to two thousand and eight era where no people from Chicago really liked Barack Obama, really pushing him, really enthusiastic about him. Walls doesn't really seem to me to have that. I don't think he's actually as popular even in Minnesota as maybe a lot of people on the

left assumed. But they still vote for him. Why. Well, I think it's this begrudging You know, we're voting DFL. We'll never vote for a Republican, come hell or high water. And the DFL is the Democrat Farmer Labor Party, which is the Democrat party's kind of name in Minnesota. It's this weird quirk of Minnesota politics that the Democratic Party

goes by the DFL the Democratic Farm Labor Party. And I think just people like, we're never going to vote for a Republican, come hell or high water, and here's this guy Tim, Well, all right, we'll vote for him. So you've got that kind then I've been thinking about Mark Robinson. Mark Robinson is the Lieutenant Governor of North

Carolina who is running for governor of North Carolina. For those of you who've maybe been paying attention to the news, Mark Robinson had a bit of oppo research about him dropped that CNN reported was able to report basically, this online account for a pornography focused message board had a lot of messages from someone who it seems very distinctly likely that it was Mark Robinson back in the two thousands.

It's around I think two thousand and seven, two thousand and nine ish, and he's saying a bunch of really lovely things, like about how Mark Robinson, who is himself African American, talking about how, hey, slavery was good, I would have had some slaves myself. Eh, you know, I consider myself a black Nazi. Like like, just the most wild, ridiculous anti social behaviors on display that we could possibly cook up in the context of like a pornography focused

message board. And his response to it is not very convincing. I played the audio on here and it the way he was responding to hell, the media is at it again. They're trying to slander Rize And he sounded like he was doing an imitation of the politicians in the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, which is kind of set in the South, kind of around the turn of the twentieth century.

the state Trump won last time. Trump won North Carolina both in twenty twenty and twenty sixteen, he really needs to win it. If he can win Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, then the things in the back and that seemingly has been from some stuff I've reading that seemingly is the Trump campaign strategy. They basically the way the math falls. If they win Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, it's over. There's no real road for Democrat victory as long as

Trump wins those three states. So there's been a ton of Trump campaign focus on those three states. Is this Dingleberry, this Dufus, Lieutenant governor of North Carolina, gonna sink Donald Trump's chances by staying in this race when clearly when it seems pretty clear, I mean, I don't know, Maybe there's a chance it with someone else with a profile suspiciously similar using a very suspiciously similar handle to other

handles that this guy used. Are we going to sink this because this guy was being horny and racist on the internet in two thousand and nine, and this guy would be is unwilling to drop out. So where does this kind of a guy come from? What motivates someone who's this level of a moron to run for office?

What motivates local Republican parties and stuff to push this guy when he seems clearly like he's an idiot, that he doesn't have much rattling around between his two ears and then I think there's sort of the ideological fatism that you see with someone like Harry Lake. Okay, Carrie Lake lost in twenty twenty or is it twenty twenty two. Rather, she, along with a whole bunch of other real, trumpy, aggressive candidates for office in twenty twenty two, got her butt kicked.

She is losing in polls right now. To her, she's running for Senate now. She ran for governor last time, she's run for Senate. Now she's getting her clock cleaned by Reuben Gego, the guy who's running. I think. I think they're running for Kirsten Cinema's seat, which Cinema decided not to run for reelection. And she's getting her brains beat in. She's down. The most recent poll show she's

down like twelve points. And it's like Trump's doing really well in Arizona comparatively, he's she's running way behind Donald Trump. So she already lost. We already kind of had a referendum on her. In twenty twenty two. There was some thought that, you know, she's a really good messenger, she's you know, former TV newscaster or whether yes or something, you know, smart, seemingly smartener presentation, but clearly super heavy, heavy, mega and clearly voters in Arizona were like, no, sorry,

we're we're not going for that. They made that decision in twenty twenty two, and Republican primary voters were like, we don't care. We still love this gal. And it's this bizarre thing in Arizona politics where it's like, hey, for Republicans to win, you know, you know how John McCain was a senator there for a million years. I

don't love John. I didn't love John McCain. I don't like John McCain's liberal and moderate leanings at all, but clearly that was attractive to a very decent number of Arizonans. And I don't think a Republican party without the John McCain voters, without the John McCain enthusiasts. I don't think a Republican party without the John mcain enthusiast is going to do anything successful in Arizona. They're not going to win.

And I think probably a lot of Trump's running to the middle, maybe even on things like abortion, it's to get those kinds of Arizona voters. Trump's even realized he needs the moderate middle of the Republican Party if he's

gonna win, but primary voters don't. I just don't understand what is the mindset of people when picking these candidates, Like we know they suck, we know they have massive, glaring flaws, but we would rather go rather deep risk, deep catastrophic losses with them than possible victory with somebody else who would probably be fine. I just don't get it. I don't get the mindset that's animating these people. And I don't understand how do we find these people rising

to politics. And that's not to say every politician's a dope. I look at someone like Jim Patterson and more and more I think of him kind of like that's you know, this is someone who was businessman, cared about a lot of things, was really animated by social conservatism too, Like brought his life experience as an adoptive father into his politics, and that animated his pro life beliefs for his whole career.

Like there's a lot of good about I'm not saying every politician's a bum, and I'm not saying it's not a noble profession, but boy, it sure does seem to attract a lot of grifters. Losers and bozos who managed to make it really high up the food chain. Anyway, just my rant for the day when we return. The weird connection between rfk's siblings and the Just Stop Oil people, the people who throw paint on priceless works of art.

That's next on the John Girardi Show. Have you seen those videos online of those weird climate proteinsters who go to museums and throw like orange paint or cans of tomato soup on works of art, and they take off their jackets to reveal a T shirt that says just Stop Oil. So I learned this about that organization Just Stop Oil, which is so loathsome, and I feel like it could be a front by the oil industry to

just make climate protesters seem unlovable. Just Stop Oil was founded and funded by Rory Kennedy, who is one of RFK Junior's siblings. She's his sister. So this is one of Robert, the original Robert Kennedys, Bobby Kennedy. This is one of his daughters and one of the big donors to it. It's actually funded by a lot of very mainstream American Democrat donors, so her and then Eileen Geddy who's part of the Getty family, which the Getty family

is like Gavin Newsom's bread and butter. They funded Gavin Newsom's entire career. So it's actually funny these climate activists who are throwing paint on stuff. It's actually coming from these very mainstream Democrat sources. I just thought that was really interesting. I hadn't learned that. So, hey, I got a radio show, thought ID tell you guys about it. That'll do it, John Gerardi Show. See you next time on Power Talk