U.S. Supreme Court

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, time and again, prominent Democrats show they are no longer content to work within the ground rules and norms of our institutions. They prefer to threaten the institutions themselves.

We have seen it in Presidential elections when Democrats say our democracy is sacrosanct when they win but illegitimate and broken if Republicans win.

We have seen it with the Senate's rules. Democrats just spent 4 years not only praising but using the legislative filibuster. But now that they hold the majority, they say it has actually been intrinsically evil all along and must be scrapped.

We are seeing it right now with voting regulations, where the mere fact that sometimes Republicans win elections has Democrats wanting to rewrite all 50 States' election laws right here in Washington and turn the Federal Election Commission into a partisan body.

And then there is the judiciary. In recent years, we have seen the Democratic leader stand on the steps of the Court and threaten that specific Justices ``won't know what hit them'' if they didn't rule the way he wanted. We have seen a number of Democratic Senators send a threatening brief suggesting the Court might need to be ``restructured'' if its rulings upset liberals.

Last week, President Biden, who was marketed to the country as a moderate and institutionalist, jumped in with both feet. He set up a pseudo-academic commission to study the merits of packing the Supreme Court. It is just an attempt to clothe this transparent power play in fake legitimacy.

But alas, the far left cannot even wait for the fake theatrics of the fake study to play out. Today, Democrats in the Senate and the House have announced they will once again threaten judicial independence from the steps of the Court. They are introducing a bill to add four new seats to the Supreme Court so that Democrats can pack the Court, destroy its legitimacy, and guarantee the rulings that liberals want.

Across the ideological spectrum, top jurists have been outspoken on what a terrible idea Court packing would be. The late liberal icon, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, explicitly warned against Court packing saying: ``If anything would make the Court appear partisan, it would be that.'' ``Nine seems to be a good number''--Justice Ginsburg.

Justice Stephen Breyer reaffirmed his own opposition just last week. The public, by the way, agrees. They see through this discredited concept. One survey late last year showed that a clear majority of Americans opposed packing the Supreme Court.

But the farthest left activists aren't interested in the common good. They want power. And the same Democrats and the same corporate media that spent the last 4 years hyperventilating and declaring a new constitutional crisis was under way every 30 seconds seem to be perfectly content to play along.

Now, if Republicans had introduced a bill to add four Supreme Court seats for the last President to fill, there would have been weeks of wall-to-wall outrage on every newspaper and cable TV channel nonstop. Now it seems the main strategies are either to shrug off, look the other way, or to actively play along and somehow lend credence.

It is not about whether this insane bill becomes law. Part of the point here is the threats themselves. The left wants a sword dangling over the Justices when they weigh the facts in every case. As the Democratic leader threatened just 2 years ago, Democrats want the Justices to know that they will ``pay the price'' for rulings that Democrats don't like.

The left wants these swords dangling over the Senate and State legislators and independent judges. The threats are the point. The hostage-taking is the point. And responsible people across the political spectrum have an absolute duty to denounce this.

(The remarks of Mr. McConnell pertaining to the introduction of S. 1133 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.''

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