U.S. Supreme Court

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, legislation called the Judiciary Act of 2021 was introduced last week that would immediately expand the Supreme Court to 13 Justices.

If this is serious in its intent, it is foolish. There is no need to expand the Court in order to meet the demands of its workload. After the peaking in 2006, when President George W. Bush was in office, the number of cases on the docket has now plummeted.

In 2019, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal icon appointed by President Clinton, told NPR that there is no need to expand the Court, saying: ``Nine seems to be a good number.''

With that established, this is a transparent ploy for power that would undermine trust in the fair application of law and delegitimize the highest Court in the land.

If this is really a serious policy piece of legislation, we certainly wouldn't change the number of Supreme Court Justices immediately. If it weren't just politics, we certainly wouldn't change the Justices before another election. In fact, Senator Joe Biden, on this Senate floor, called FDR's attempt to pack the Court ``a power grab,'' and as a Presidential candidate this last year, he refused to endorse expanding the number of Justices.

Earlier this month, Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Clinton, said the Court's authority depends on ``a trust that the Court is guided by legal principles, not politics.'' He continued by saying, ``Structural alteration motivated by the perception of political influence can only feed that latter perception, further eroding that trust.''

If the public sees any judge and Supreme Court Justices as politicians in robes, the public's confidence in the courts and in the rule of law itself can only be diminished, diminishing the Court's power, including its power to act as a check on other branches of government.

Last August, Gallup found that 58 percent of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing. In fact, the Supreme Court's approval ratings have actually increased in the last several years. Polling from February of this year finds that 35 percent of Americans approve of the job that we in Congress are doing, and that is up from 15 percent not many days ago.

I raise this data to demonstrate that the Supreme Court is an institution which a majority of Americans continues to place its trust in. That is a significant circumstance in today's polarized world, but a majority of Americans still believes it can trust the Supreme Court. If we in Congress inject ourselves into the size of the Court's composition, Justice Breyer is exactly right, in that the trust the American people have that the rulings will be delivered on a fair reading of the law will be further undermined.

On the Republican side of the aisle, we have seen our share of defeats in recent years, and not once when the Republican Party controlled Congress and had the White House were there efforts to expand the Supreme Court. Can you imagine how the left or the media would react if President Trump had attempted to expand the Court to 13 Justices and add 4 Republican-nominated Justices during his tenure?

We have not attempted to expand the Court because the Supreme Court should not serve as another legislative body. That is our job--a job we need to do much better than we do today so that more than one-third of the American people can place their confidence in us as we pass laws.

We have had the same number of Supreme Court Justices for more than 150 years. Perhaps the Judiciary Act of 2021 is less an effort to expand the Supreme Court than it is an effort to intimidate sitting Justices to deliver rulings favorable to the ideology of my colleagues who are proposing the legislation. From guns to abortion, to religious liberties, to other hot-button issues, my colleagues are threatening the Justices either to deliver favorable rulings or to not take up divisive cases at all. If this is what my colleagues seek to accomplish, I am confident that the independence and integrity of our Justices will prevail. Indeed, this must prevail to preserve the American people's confidence in the institution of the courts, in the judicial system, in the Supreme Court.

I am disappointed because, rather than working with each other across the aisle--across this aisle right here--to pass legislation, the Democrats are more interested in pursuing a larger Supreme Court and more interested in eliminating the filibuster to pass their agenda--to stack the Court to prevent their legislation from being struck down as unconstitutional.

Process matters around here. We have to get to the point at which we utilize the process to get a fair and just result, wherein all people's voices are heard, wherein all Members of the Senate have the opportunity to express their views and have an opportunity for that to be voted on, but we don't skew the process to get a desired outcome. We all need to do our jobs to convince our colleagues that we are right in our positions, that our legislation is meritorious. We don't and we shouldn't change the process to get our way.

The checks and balances of our Constitution work. They have worked for a long time. They are important to this country. When we talk about how divisive things are on the Senate floor and in this country today, the solution to that is not to change the rules in the middle of the game. It is to abide by the rules that protect our freedoms and liberties.

I implore my colleagues to have the same faith in these constitutional guardrails as I do, to have the same faith in the independence and fairness of the Supreme Court that a majority of Americans has, and to believe that we can work together, that you and I can work together on behalf of the Americans we serve, the Americans we represent, without resorting to acts that will damage us all today and for generations to come.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source