Time to Make the Supreme Court Great Again?

      President Trump and the Senate's Republican leader Mitch McConnell have both listed Trump's record-setting appointments of more than 140 federal judges as one of Trump's most important accomplishments in office. Many of those judges, like Trump's two Supreme Court justices, were confirmed by party-line votes in the face of strong opposition from Democrats and liberal advocacy groups, but the issue of judicial appointments went all but completely unmentioned in six hours of Democratic presidential debates last week [July 29, 30].
      The American Constitution Society (ACS), the liberal counterpart to the conservative Federalist Society, led a coalition of groups in urging CNN moderators beforehand to ask the assembled Democratic hopefuls about Supreme Court and judicial appointments, but to no avail. Media commentators noted critically afterward that the CNN moderators appeared to be selecting issues with an aim to highlighting disagreements among the Democrats instead of their shared disagreements with Trump and his policies.
      With the debates over and judicial appointments unmentioned, a truncated debate broke out on Twitter over the political value or risk for Democrats in making the Supreme Court and judicial appointments an issue in the 2020 campaign. Historically, a half-century of presidential campaigns shows that Republicans from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump have made the high court their winning issue time and again; Democrats have tried only weakly to use the issue to mobilize Democratic and independent voters.
      Democrats can and must do better in 2020, according to leading groups on the legal left. They want the eventual Democratic nominee to go beyond bland promises to appoint justices in the style of Brennan and Marshall and to go all in by backing structural reform, such as increasing the size of the Court, to neutralize the Republican justices' current majority.
      Aaron Belkin and Sean McElwee, director and polling director respectively of Take Back the Court, argued in an article written for Salon that Democrats must "recognize and reckon with the fact that the high court is a political institution that has been hijacked by the GOP to advance a partisan agenda on behalf of corporations and billionaires." Belkin and McElwee go on to say that it is "an imperative that  Democrats make the case to voters that democracy cannot be restored unless the court is reformed."
      Belkin and McElwee do not cite particulars, but the Court's end-of-term decision to close federal courts to legal challenges to the unpopular practice of partisan gerrymandering may leave it peculiarly vulnerable to attack for being uninterested in protecting voters' rights. Belkin and McElwee in fact promise a forthcoming report that will show Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to vote just as conservatively as his conservative colleagues and his reputation for centrism "wholly at odds with his record."
      Among the two dozen Democrats currently in the running for the presidential nomination, 11 say they are open to expanding the size of the Court. One of those, Pete Buttigieg, has gone further by expressing interest in the proposal by two academics to expand the number of justices to 15. The balanced bench proposal by the two professors calls for five justices from each of the two major political parties and the other five chosen from sitting federal appellate judges by the other 10 by either unanimous or supermajority vote.
      Any discussion of changing the size of the Court will lead opponents to draw parallels to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ill-fated "Court packing" proposal at the beginning of his third term in the White House. Present-day advocates of structural reform will be hard pressed to counteract the lesson drawn from that episode, but the distinction can be drawn by noting, for example, McConnell's role in blocking President Obama's nomination of the widely respected moderate appellate judge Merrick Garland in 2016.
      McConnell's role in keeping the vacancy open through the November election allowed Trump to use the issue to great effect, according to post-election exit polls. The Supreme Court was the most important issue for 21 percent of voters, according to the CNN poll, and more than half of those voters went for Trump.
      Democrats in 2020 need to make the Supreme Court their issue. They can do that by emphasizing the role that the Roberts Court has already played in weakening protections for workers and consumers and the role that an unreformed Court could play in undoing policies to address health care, climate change, and gun safety. Democrats should also promise to take judicial appointments out of the hands of the Koch Brothers-financed Federalist Society and promise to appoint fair-minded judges with no ideological agenda other than protecting liberty and justice for all.
      Senators from both parties are certain to accuse the other party of politicizing judicial appointments. History shows that Republicans have done that for 50 years, but Democrats not so much. Four of the Republican-appointed justices on the current Court were confirmed in party-line votes by historically narrow margins, with fewer than 60 votes each. All four of the Democratic-appointed justices came to the Court with reputations as judicial moderates and won confirmation by wide margins: Sotomayor and Kagan with more than 60 votes each and Ginsburg and Breyer with 96 and 87 votes respectively.
      It is time to make the Supreme Court great again. That could be and should be a winning message for Democrats in 2020, with or without a cap.