The Supremes

In the wake of a leaked draft opinion showing the United States Supreme Court could be set to overturn Roe v. Wade, I've heard some renewed talk from folks on the left about how we need to increase the number of Supreme Court justices. This is something Democrats have looked into doing before and, perhaps naively, I find it perplexing. Not, at its core, the idea of changing how many justices sit on the SCOTUS bench, but the reasoning. Those on the left who have broached the notion have done so as a sort of remedy for the court becoming more conservative. I'm just not seeing what the numbers have to do with it. What matters is the who, not how many.

Let's look at the situation in reverse. There are currently nine Supreme Court justices. That, in theory, should be more liberal than if there were, say, five. So, let's go with that. Let's also apply real life appointments to this scenario. Taking the five most recent SCOTUS appointments (and we'll include Ketanji Brown Jackson, even though hasn't yet been seated), we'd have three members appointed by a Republican (Trump), and two by Democrats (Obama and Biden). Removing Brown Jackson, and keeping it at the most recent currently-serving justices doesn't change the equation. So, you'd have a 3-2 conservative majority, whereas now we have a 6-3 conservative majority (with Chief Justice Roberts sometimes filling a more moderate role).

You can see where I'm going with this. Simply upping the number of people who serve on the Supreme Court does not guarantee any type of substantive change in its political makeup (and, yes, SCOTUS is political). We could always change how justices are appointed, however, the method we have in-place now would seem -- on paper, anyway -- to be fair: One hundred senators, duly-elected by the people of the United States, vote on who gets to serve on our nation's highest court. That said, there have been some nefarious shenanigans afoot in recent years. Neil Gorsuch really shouldn't be on the Supreme Court. When Justice Scalia died, then-Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell pretended that the Senate shouldn't consider a SCOTUS nominee during an election year (something be about-faced on in 2020), so Obama was denied a third appointment.

Times are rough for our nation, and the midterms aren't looking good for Democrats. I'm pissed-off about the potential for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, and what it could also mean for other rulings (same-sex marriage among them). That said, I just don't see how increasing the number of Supreme Court justices would help. Honestly -- and this is something not a lot of people on the left seem willing to admit -- we're being outplayed. We don't have a majority of Democrats in governors' mansions, the Senate is split 50-50, our numbers in the House are dwindling, and an increasing number of minorities voted for Trump in the last election. We're not playing the game well. And, if you're playing Monopoly, and losing, then you don't ask for the rules to be changed. You learn how to play better.

Of course, politics isn't Monopoly, and it isn't a game. It's the system we've chosen for governing our society. People's lives and well-being literally depends on the system functioning well and serving the people. Right now, it isn't. And that's a problem that increasing the number of Supreme Court justices won't solve. That's a move of desperation, and those rarely work out well.