The “blue ribbon” commission appointed by President Joe Biden to study the problem of Republican court packing, particularly at the U.S. Supreme Court, has gone beyond being an ineffective and useless body (as most blue ribbon commissions usually are) to being downright dangerous. It released a draft report Thursday, ahead of a scheduled Friday meeting, full of Federalist Society narratives and Republican lies.
The commission was formed in April. In the intervening months, the Supreme Court has allowed Texas to ban abortion and prevented the Biden administration from conducting executive business by blocking both the COVID-19 emergency eviction moratorium and the ending of the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico policy.” All of that was done as part of the shadow docket—emergency appeals that were not argued before the Court, and in unsigned opinions. In regular session, they gutted the Voting Rights Act and made it harder for workers to organize. All that has happened in the six months of the commission’s existence.
And yet, the commission warns that a proposal to expand the Supreme Court to achieve some ideological balance might “reinforce the notion that the Justices are partisan actors.” Gosh, who could have any idea that the justices are partisan? Certainly not this blundering commission. They also argue that “it is far from clear that ideological balance is in and of itself a desirable goal.” Which is pretty much what you would expect a commission weighted down with Federalist Society members to argue. After all, they’re winning.
They’re winning, and they are denying it. The commission set out as a fact for discussion that “First, even as the Court is at the center of escalating partisan conflict, its rulings have not fallen consistently along ‘party lines,’ where Justices appointed by Republicans always vote in a predictably conservative fashion and Justices appointed by Democrats vote in a consistently liberal one.” That “always” is doing a helluva lot of work there, and the commission goes on to try to prove that assertion by saying “a significant portion of the Court’s work is not highly ideological,” so that’s why the court isn’t ideological. Never mind all those other ideological cases, where Republicans are winning.
Just to emphasize how pro-Republican this commission and its conclusions are, it repeated the Republican lie that the blockade of President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, in an election year was normal procedure. It quotes Sen. Chuck Grassley, asserting that “it’s been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year.” It has not been standard practice. Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan nominee, was appointed in 1988. The commission knows that’s a lie, because they were told that in the August testimony of Aaron Belkin, founder of Take Back the Court, who warned them that the testimony they heard from critics of Supreme Court expansion was a lie.
“The simple fact is that these witnesses produced no actual precedent for Senate Republicans’ actions, because none exist,” Belkin testified. “And in making their case, they pretend a Senate controlled by Democrats did not confirm Anthony Kennedy in 1988, the final year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. But that confirmation did happen, so conservatives attempt to define it out of existence with technically-accurate statements intended to create an inaccurate understanding of history.”
Just to demonstrate how bad an unbalanced this draft report is, there’s this:
Yes, there was evidentiary evidence—Blasey Ford’s testimony. That’s evidence. Furthermore, as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been doggedly reminding the public, the FBI utterly botched the investigation, creating a sham of a process.
Whitehouse also provides a detailed critique of the report. Let’s just say, he’s not a fan.
This commission demonstrates the lie that is “bipartisanship” in 2021. It’s been a lie for years and years, but now it’s reached utter insanity. Let’s hope that the memory of what that word once meant to Senate Democrats—and to Joe Biden—doesn’t blind them to the reality when they evaluate this report. And that they proceed to toss it in the bin.