By JOE PATRICE
onApril 15, 2021 at 1:43 PM

Court expansion is a popular idea among rank-and-file Democratic voters, which is a shame because it’s a bad one.

But, yet again, they’re locking in on the idea with a bill fronted by Senator Ed Markey and Representative Jerry Nadler that would expand the Court to 13 members. It’s an expansion that conveniently would transform the current 6-3 conservative majority into a 7-6 liberal to progressive majority. What are the odds?

Court expansion is a lot like getting into a boxing match with the heavyweight champ and thinking one punch below the belt should probably win it for you. You might cause momentary discomfort, but the champ is probably going to sterilize you. Expansion is a wretched solution to the Supreme Court’s current flaws, yet this current bill might mark the first time in a long while that talk of expansion isn’t the worst idea in the world.

To be sure, the Trump administration amounted to a gross abuse of constitutional order, managing to use a single, minority-elected term to fill two vacancies with three justices poised to serve for decades. Not that anything the Republicans did was “un”-constitutional so much as it spit on the document by cynically exploiting norms that the Framers never dreamed any American official would breach. If you think “refusing to fill a vacancy for a year and declaring to never do so if you lost the next election” is something James Madison would have abided, you’ve been getting high on FedSoc’s Chick-fil-A for too long.