Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted what he called the “fake news” media on Wednesday for omitting how Justice Stephen Breyer and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg viewed efforts to expand the Supreme Court from its current nine members.
“I’ve never been one to complain about fake news. But I want to start with the total frustration on the coverage that most of you have engaged with in regard to the issue of expanding the Supreme Court,” McConnell (R-Ky.) said at his weekly news conference on Capitol Hill.
Amid a current push by President Biden and congressional Democrats to pack the court, McConnell said that as media outlets report on the Democrats’ proposal, they fail to include how liberals Breyer and Ginsburg believed the court should have only nine members.
“And yet I read story after story after story that do not mention that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, two of the most important liberals in modern time, are opposed to court-packing,” he said.
President Joe Biden created a commission to study court reforms, including adding justices to the Supreme Court. APIn a 2019 interview with NPR, Ginsburg said adding to the number of justices would only harm the court’s independence.
“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” she said. “I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.”
And Breyer, in a speech at Harvard Law School earlier this month, said lawmakers should “think long and hard” about expanding the court because they would expose justices to political influence.
”Why don’t you include in these objective analyses of this issue, that fact?,” McConnell asked.
Democrats last week unveiled their proposal to expand the court to 13 justices, and Biden signed an executive order to create a commission to study court reforms, including adding seats to the Supreme Court.
Democrats have proposed expanding the Supreme Court from nine justices to 13. AFP via Getty ImagesMcConnell, who presided over the confirmations of three of former President Donald Trump’s nominees — Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — said he sees through Biden’s “faux-academic study of a nonexistent problem.”
“This new court-packing commission is not some serious pivot away from Democrats’ political attacks on the court,” McConnell said earlier this month.
“It’s just an attempt to clothe those attacks in fake legitimacy.”
McConnell also scuttled former President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the court in 2016, saying the selection should be up to whoever was elected president that fall.
