With Judge Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court confirmation hearings underway this week, a drumbeat of misinformation is emerging from Democrats and the media. Let's start with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has been churning out outrageous arguments and outright lies on this front. His continued refusal to give voters any answer on whether he'd support packing the Supreme Court has gotten considerably worse and more brazen in recent days. He's now saying that Americans must give him power, then discover whether he still holds his anti-court-packing stance. He's telling reporters, explicitly, that voters will find out his position on this radical idea after the election is over:
Joe Biden:
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) October 8, 2020
"You'll know my opinion on court packing when the election is over." pic.twitter.com/uYEXZHHAp1
A journalist followed-up the next day, asking whether Biden believes voters deserve to know his views before the election is decided. Biden's answer? Incredible:
Asked if voters deserve to know if he would pack the Supreme Court, Biden says “No, they don’t deserve” to. pic.twitter.com/uig5d14tsH
— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) October 10, 2020
Thursday in Arizona:
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) October 10, 2020
Biden: “You'll know my opinion on court packing when the election is over.”
Friday in Nevada:
Reporter: “Don’t the voters deserve to know?”
Biden: “No, they don’t deserve to.”
The arrogance is staggering. I'll remind you that Biden is running as the moderate candidate who will reunite the country, pursue bipartisanship, restore our threatened norms, and defend institutions. That's the crux of his pitch to the country. If you're tired of the endless drama and swirling controversy around the incumbent, Biden is presenting himself as a generic alternative and a safe harbor. That posture, which has been effective, is totally incompatible with any attempt to explode two longstanding institutional norms to achieve a radical power grab. Yet he's hiding the ball, with no subtlety, on court-packing. He won't tell us if he'd agree to it as president, and he doesn't think we have a right to know before the election. Whether you believe he's remaining strategically ambiguous in order to avoid alienating any component of his coalition, to deny Republicans a rallying cry, or to retain some potential leverage (or some combination thereof), his evasions are completely insulting and unacceptable. I'm not sure whether he actually has no intention of court-packing, and is merely trying to avoid angering the Left -- or if he's toying with moving forward with it, but doesn't want to scare off moderates. I tend to lean slightly toward the former, but the latter is also frighteningly plausible. The point is, we shouldn't have to guess.
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Making matters worse, Biden and his campaign are pairing their avoidance of taking any clear position on court-packing with straight-up lies about these issues. Biden, like his running mate at her debate, is now deliberately conflating filling judicial vacancies with "court packing," an Orwellian redefining of terms. Aggressively filling existing vacancies (which Republicans have been doing throughout the Trump presidency, using a tool made available to them by yet another unprecedented escalation from Senate Democrats in 2013) is not in the same universe as adding new seats to the Supreme Court. Biden, as a longtime veteran of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- and who has railed against actual court-packing over the course of decades -- obviously knows this. He's leaning into the dishonest deflections anyway:
Biden is again asked why voters don’t deserve to know his views on court packing. He responds: “The only court packing going on right now is going on with Republicans packing the court right now ... I’m going to stay focused on it so we don’t take our eyes off the ball here." pic.twitter.com/E9H5rIXMX2
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) October 10, 2020
He's also claiming, absolutely falsely, that what Republicans are doing to fill the current vacancy before the election is "unconstitutional" or "not constitutional." He knows better, yet he's saying it anyway. The unambiguous truth is that what Republicans are doing is clearly constitutional and in alignment with the overwhelming historical precedent. The "unconstitutional" line is especially, flagrantly untrue -- a point CNN anchor Jake Tapper made to a Biden campaign spokesperson as she tried to deceive viewers yesterday:
Wow: “‘Constitutional’ doesn’t mean ‘I like it or I don’t like it’...There’s nothing unconstitutional about what the U.S. Senate is doing.”@jaketapper just shredded a pundit arguing that Trump’s nomination of #AmyConeyBarrett is somehow unconstitutional. pic.twitter.com/4ohe40f0p8
— John Cooper (@thejcoop) October 11, 2020
Others in the press are abruptly adopting Democrats' mendacious rhetoric. It's head-spinning:
Denying a vote on Merrick Garland for almost a full year while rushing in a nominee closer to a presidential election than ever before in American history would qualify as what if not "court packing"? https://t.co/bBWwbaaeX1
— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) October 11, 2020
Can we at least recognize that “Court Packing” at all levels of the judiciary has been the Republican playbook for decades? Asking for Merrick Garland.
— Dan Rather (@DanRather) October 11, 2020
With lightning speed, the Associated Press adopts Democrats' language on SCOTUS: adding members is now "depoliticizing" the court, only "critics" refer to it as "packing." pic.twitter.com/IBujBwmWE2
— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) October 11, 2020
The 2016 Garland blockade was hardball politics, with the GOP applying Democrats' own standards to the situation at hand. The outcome was also the historical norm: The Senate declining to confirm a SCOTUS nominee from the opposing party's president during a presidential election year. Confirming Ginsburg's replacement would similarly be the historical norm under the circumstances, given that the Senate and White House are controlled by the same party. And none of it is "court packing," and arguments to the contrary are false, emotionalist and incoherent. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) promoted the lie -- it's as if a memo went out, all at once -- on Fox News Sunday. Here's Sen. Ben Sasse responding, calling the insane one-two punch of nuking the filibuster and adding Supreme Court seats "suicide bombing" two branches of government:
I'll leave you with this moment from the Colorado Senate debate. Control of the upper chamber is extremely important, especially if Biden wins, as seems likely:
Q: "Would you vote to pack the Supreme Court?"
— MearaJM (@MillennialOther) October 9, 2020
. @Hickenlooper: *rambles in furry*
Q: "How about you, Sen. Gardner?"
. @CoryGardner: "No, and I yield the rest of my time to Hickenlooper to actually answer the question."
Hickenlooper: *giggles in ethics violations* #COSEN pic.twitter.com/GmAt9EOD6o
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