Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., slammed planned Democrat legislation seeking the addition of four justices to the Supreme Court on Thursday, and called on "responsible people" from both sides to object to what he and other Republicans are calling a power play to control all of government.
"Responsible people across the political spectrum have an absolute duty to denounce this," McConnell said from the Senate floor.
Democrats, he added, prefer to "threaten the institutions themselves" when they can win no other way.
"We've seen it in presidential elections when Democrats say our democracy is sacrosanct when they win, but illegitimate and broken if Republicans win," McConnell said. "We've seen it with the Senate's rules. Democrats just spent four years not only praising but using the legislative filibuster but now that they hold the majority, they say it has been intrinsically evil all along and must be scrapped."
It's also seen with voting regulations, McConnell said.
"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," McConnell said.
And with the judiciary, "in recent years we've seen Democratic leaders 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 they wanted. We've seen a number of Democratic senators send threatening briefs suggesting the court might need to be 'restructured' if its rulings upset liberals."
President Joe Biden last week set up a commission last week to study the merits of adding justices, and McConnell on Thursday blasted the effort as "pseudo-academic" and called it an "attempt to clothe this transparent power play in fake legitimacy," but said the far-left can't even wait "for the fake theatrics of the fake study to play out."
"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," McConnell said.
He also pointed out that even liberal icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg explicitly warned against packing the court, because if anything would "'make the court appear partisan, it would be that. Nine seems to be a good number.'"
Justice Steven Breyer has also spoken out against adding justices, McConnell said, and the public agrees and can "see through this discredited concept."
"One survey late last year showed a clear majority of Americans oppose packing the Supreme Court, but the farthest left activists aren't interested in the common good, they want power," the senator said. "The same Democrats and the same corporate media that spent the last four years hyperventilating and declaring a new constitutional crisis was underway every 30 seconds seem to be perfectly content to play along."
But if Republicans had introduced a bill in hopes of allowing former President Donald Trump, when he was in office, to fill four additional court seats, there would have been "weeks of wall-to-wall outrage on every newspaper and cable TV channel non-stop," McConnell added.
It's not even about whether the "insane bill" becomes law, but the threats of the action itself, he continued.
"The left wants a sword dangling over the justices when they weigh the facts in every case," McConnell said. "They want justices to know they'll pay the price for rulings that Democrats don't like. The left wants these swords dangling over the Senate and state legislatures and independent judges."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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