An idea whose time has come?

I like it. I REALLY like it.

Whenever the Supreme Court has one of its fairly rare good rulings – and especially when that ruling isn’t part of an obvious horse trade behind the scenes (e.g., “we’ll give you your Title IX reforms in exchange for birthright citizenship”) – the Left never hesitates to propose “packing the Court” and adding a couple of more communist justices to the bench so that such unusual defeats become impossible. The threat has also worked when it’s been credible. The “switch in time that saved nine” cleared the decks for Roosevelt’s New Deal after he legitimately threatened to pack the court. Once exclusively the domain of the Left, non-Leftists also sometimes call for packing the Court because of how beholden the Court is to the Leftist powers that be and ensuring that they never become the powers that were.

The non-Left increasingly see the same tactic as viable: add a couple of non-communist justices to the bench so that the non-left more often gets what it wants out of the Court. This is a flawed strategy. If there were a way for the non-Left to so pack the Court, it would play into the Left’s hands. How many “good” – on paper, anyway – justices have been seated in the past 25 years, only for them to be more or less immediately exposed as wolves in sheep’s clothing? Without being able to guarantee that the extra two or three justices would be Clarence Thomases, the risk outweighs the reward. That style of Court packing is likely to backfire.

So, if this upcoming election goes well, we ought to consider packing the Court – not like the Left proposes it, but in a different way and with a different purpose. The traditional notion of packing the Court so as to ensure – or improve the odds of – victory for your side is too timid. Better to obviate and humiliate the Court than try to co-opt it by padding the numbers. So think big. Don’t add a few justices. Add a lot of justices and adapt the quorum rules to grind it to a halt. Make the Court far too unmaneuverable to avoid gridlock – and too absurd to command respect.

Grow the number of justices not to 13 or 17 or 19, but to 100,000. Build them a stadium to work in, and they can travel around to major college football stadiums for trials until it’s constructed. With the new count would come new quorum rules, as those are also set by legislation. Right now, there are nine justices, with six required for quorum. Make the new quorum requirement 75,000 justices. Without at least that many justices confirmed and present, no cases can be heard. The odds of SCOTUS hearing any case again under such a scenario are fairly slim. Since such a large number would make seating good justices impossible, it would also simplify confirmation. Nominate anyone. Take a page out of Caligula’s book and put a horse on the bench. It just wouldn’t matter anymore.

And that, after all, must be the ultimate goal here. T’is a consummation devoutly to be wished, sayeth moi.

Leave a Reply

CF Archives

Categories

Comments policy

NOTE: In order to comment, you must be registered and approved as a CF user. Since so many user-registrations are attempted by spam-bots for their own nefarious purposes, YOUR REGISTRATION MAY BE ERRONEOUSLY DENIED.

If you are in fact a legit hooman bean desirous of registering yourself a CF user name so as to be able to comment only to find yourself caught up as collateral damage in one of my irregularly (un)scheduled sweeps for hinky registration attempts, please shoot me a kite at the email addy over in the right sidebar and let me know so’s I can get ya fixed up manually.

ALSO NOTE: You MUST use a valid, legit email address in order to successfully register, the new anti-spam software I installed last night requires it. My thanks to Barry for all his help sorting this mess out last night.

Comments appear entirely at the whim of the guy who pays the bills for this site and may be deleted, ridiculed, maliciously edited for purposes of mockery, or otherwise pissed over as he in his capricious fancy sees fit. The CF comments section is pretty free-form and rough and tumble; tolerance level for rowdiness and misbehavior is fairly high here, but is NOT without limit.

Management is under no obligation whatever to allow the comments section to be taken over and ruined by trolls, Leftists, and/or other oxygen thieves, and will take any measures deemed necessary to prevent such. Conduct yourself with the merest modicum of decorum, courtesy, and respect and you'll be fine. Pick pointless squabbles with other commenters, fling provocative personal insults, issue threats, or annoy the host (me) and...you won't.

Should you find yourself sanctioned after running afoul of the CF comments policy as stated and feel you have been wronged, please download and complete the Butthurt Report form below in quadruplicate; retain one copy for your personal records and send the others to the email address posted in the right sidebar.

Please refrain from whining, sniveling, and/or bursting into tears and waving your chubby fists around in frustrated rage, lest you suffer an aneurysm or stroke unnecessarily. Your completed form will be reviewed and your complaint addressed whenever management feels like getting around to it. Thank you.

CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

Fake Phony Fraud(s), S'faccim: two excellent descriptors coined by the late great WABC host Bob Grant which are interchangeable, both meaning as they do pretty much the same thing

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

The Enemy: shitlibs, Progtards, Leftards, Swamp critters, et al ad nauseum

Burn, Loot, Murder: what the misleading acronym BLM really stands for

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

"Mike Hendrix is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged blogger in the world." ‐Henry Chinaski

Subscribe to CF!

Support options

Shameless begging

If you enjoy the site, please consider donating:

Correspondence

Email addy: mike-at-this-url dot etc

All e-mails assumed to be legitimate fodder for publication, scorn, ridicule, or other public mockery unless specified as private by the sender

Allied territory

Alternatives to shitlib social media: A few people worth following on Gab:

Fuck you

Kill one for mommy today! Click to embiggen

Notable Quotes

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution

Claire's Cabal—The Freedom Forums

FREEDOM!!!

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
Daniel Webster

“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill.”
Charles Bukowski

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
Ezra Pound

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
Frank Zappa

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”
John Adams

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
Bertrand de Jouvenel

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
GK Chesterton

"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
Donald Sensing

"The only way to live free is to live unobserved."
Etienne de la Boiete

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil."
Skeptic

"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork."
David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar

"If the laws of God and men, are therefore of no effect, when the magistracy is left at liberty to break them; and if the lusts of those who are too strong for the tribunals of justice, cannot be otherwise restrained than by sedition, tumults and war, those seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man."
John Adams

"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass

"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine."
Joseph Goebbels

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
Ronald Reagan

"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it."
NC Reed, from Parno's Peril

"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in."
Bill Whittle

Best of the best

Finest hosting service

Image swiped from The Last Refuge

2016 Fabulous 50 Blog Awards

RSS feed

RSS - entries - Entries
RSS - entries - Comments

Boycott the New York Times -- Read the Real News at Larwyn's Linx

Copyright © 2026