If Biden packs the Court, it will further legislate from the bench. It is much easier for a handful of justices to implement a radical progressive agenda than it is to convince a majority of 100 Senators and 435 Representatives to do the progressives’ bidding.
Presidential candidate Joe Biden has been asked repeatedly whether he would “pack” the Supreme Court by increasing the number of justices beyond the current nine as some Democrats, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, have threatened. Biden has refused to state his position on packing the court likely because he fears either alienating his progressive base if he refuses to add justices or alienating his more moderate base if he favors adding justices.
If Biden packs the Court, it will further legislate from the bench. It is much easier for a handful of justices to implement a radical progressive agenda than it is to convince a majority of 100 Senators and 435 Representatives to do the progressives’ bidding.
Packing the court would facilitate a progressive hegemony. That is the political reason for packing the court. There is an ideological reason that is even more fundamental: identity politics. For many progressives, there is no objective truth. Rather, each identity group has its own perception of truth based on members’ unique experiences. As Christians, this political and cultural move shouldn’t surprise us. It happened early in the Mainline Protestant churches.
When Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared before the Senate judicial committee in 2009, concerns were voiced over her 2001 statement:
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
…My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage. [1]
In other words, since there is no objective truth common to all people but only individual perspectives based on race, gender, and sexual orientation, it is essential that every group be represented on the Court. In the past, heterosexual white males have “rigged the system” in order to maintain their power. This is Critical Race Theory (CRT). According to CRT, those in power have legislated in a way that preserves their power. It follows then that the marginalized and oppressed have greater moral authority and a “greater ability to see the way truly things are. Only powerlessness and oppression bring moral high ground and true knowledge.”[2] Therefore to include all truths based on the perspective of the powerless, the Court would have to include justices representing oppressed groups of which there are infinite combinations (that’s called intersectionality) but would at least include: Blacks (Clarence Thomas doesn’t acknowledge he is oppressed and therefore doesn’t “count”), LGBT, transgender, First Nation, etc.
