Senate Dem Calls for Packing SCOTUS a Day After Amy Coney Barrett Proved High Court Is Compromised

It’s no secret that Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Ed Markey basically believes that the Supreme Court needs to be packed, and packed with liberals.

Heck, if he could get away with it, he’d just put the entirety of the graduating class of Harvard Law on there, although maybe he’d limit it to those who were members in good standing of Students for Justice in Palestine. Gotta keep the occasional Ben Shapiro that the Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution accidentally turns out off that packed court at all costs, because you don’t want that cancer to spread.

For the majority of the time that I have had to professionally care about the ramblings of Ed Markey — almost six years, actually — he has believed this. Beginning in 2020, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and was to be replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, Markey said that “we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court” if President Donald Trump nominated a justice.

His dumb reasoning, like that of so many Democrats, was that there was some kind of “precedent” set by the fact that the Senate refused to vote on former President Barack Obama’s replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016.

This, Markey said, “set the precedent.” The “precedent,” such as it was, involved the fact that the GOP had a Senate majority, and Obama had picked so many fights with them that even the most moderate of candidates didn’t have the votes. (And he didn’t do that: You may remember his nominee, Merrick Garland, as the Biden-era attorney general who cracked down on such obvious terror threats as, um, concerned parents of schoolchildren and “traditional Catholics.”)

In the case of Ginsburg’s death, Trump had the majority and a nominee who could get the votes. Cry harder.

Mitch McConnell set the precedent. No Supreme Court vacancies filled in an election year. If he violates it, when Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.

— Ed Markey (@EdMarkey) September 19, 2020

He’s basically been on one ever since; in 2021 and 2023, he introduced legislation that would expand the bench to 13 because of what he called “stolen” seats. These bills were doomed because some Democrats live in reality — or at least commute to it sometimes for work — and know this would touch off a process of mutually assured destruction of the court, which would see it balloon to the size of Wyoming, depending on who was in power, all with no stable body of case law to draw from because the decisions would change from administration to administration.

This is the bargain we make for having a functioning Supreme Court. Occasionally, it doesn’t go our way as conservatives, even though Republican presidents have nominated the majority of the justices. This week was one of those weeks, when the court ruled that the 14th Amendment provides for birthright citizenship even for people who are not legally here and therefore not, to use that amendment’s language, necessarily “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in this country.

Barrett was more or less the swing vote on whether this constitutionally held up; while it was a 6-3 vote in Trump v. Barbara on whether or not birthright citizenship stood, Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a brief concurrence on the substance of the case while acknowledging that he was basing it upon the fact that Congress had adopted birthright citizenship legislation with language virtually identical to that of the 14th Amendment, indicating that it was not a constitutional but a legislative issue that Congress could rectify, but which President Trump could not via executive order.

Ergo, on constitutional grounds, it’s basically Barrett — whom Markey so vehemently fought against, and has used when he’s waved the bloody flag of “stolen” seats to rally people around court expansion — who’s responsible for the decision. It is still worth noting that, in no world where the filibuster still exists, will the repeal of the legislation that Kavanaugh’s concurrence hinged upon happen. Nuke the filibuster, however, and court expansion becomes a fait accompli.

So, two of those “stolen” seats effectively delivered the Democrats a decision they wanted — needed, in fact, one might say, given the party’s reliance on demographic drift to deliver results. At least to Ed Markey, this should be proof that the system works, right?

Right?

We’re talking about it, so obviously the answer is no.

Here’s Sen. Markey on MS NOW — you may not have caught it, since nobody catches MS NOW these days — saying that, yes, he’s going to bang the drum loudly and proudly about expanding the court if and when there’s a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president:

Democrat Senator Ed Markey is leading Democrats’ attempt to pack the Supreme Court:

“I am the author of the court expansion bill…the only way to solve this problem in a very short period of time is to expand the Supreme Court…” pic.twitter.com/K950tx925a

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 1, 2026

“I am the author of the court expansion bill. The Republicans stole two Supreme Court seats in 2016 and 2020. That’s what’s giving them their supermajority,” Markey told host Alicia Menendez.

“The only way to solve this problem in a very short period of time is to expand the Supreme Court by four seats, up to 13. That would then restore the 7-6 majority, which should be in place right now. [Emphasis ours.] And we have to fight for that, and we can do that statutorily. It does not require a constitutional amendment. That has to be at the top of the agenda, and that’s what I’m talking to my colleagues about right now.”

There you have it: It’s not about the court making decisions based on the law; it’s about the court acting as an unelected legislative branch that is permanently Democrat. Even under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who tried this when the New Deal didn’t get through as quickly or to the scope that he wanted, got rebuked by the legislative branch for trying to court-pack. Instead, they just attained what they wanted by letting the court drift slowly to the left over the period of a century.

This scam worked for years, in part because the Democrats controlled the Senate for so long, and then in part because they were willing to filibuster Republican judicial nominees who were anywhere to the right of Potter “I Know It When I See It” Stewart.

But, in 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid got greedy. The Nevada Democrat was under pressure from the Obama White House to get Republicans to stop filibustering his judicial nominees the way that Obama’s Democrats used to filibuster Republican nominees when there was a Republican president. Reid exercised the nuclear option, figuring, hey, what’s the worst that can happen?

They lost the majority in the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016 — that’s what happened. And suddenly, it wasn’t milquetoast Potter Stewarts, but Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

If you need to ask yourself why they need to pack the court with justices like Amy Coney Barrett still delivering for them on occasion, there’s your answer.

They don’t get their Roe or Casey decisions anymore on abortion, or Obergefell on gay marriage, or Furman v. Georgia and Roper v. Simmons on the application of the death penalty, or Lawrence v. Texas bestowing a right to homosexual behavior that doesn’t exist in the Constitution, or Grutter v. Bollinger on so-called “race-conscious admissions” at universities. None of this stuff, which couldn’t be passed in Congress but which got enacted because the Democrats gamed the system, would have ever flown — and it doesn’t usually fly now, all because Harry Reid and Barack Obama got greedy.

On the occasions it does fly, Ed Markey is still grousing about the fact that he doesn’t have that majority he believes is the Democrats’ birthright. Barrett betrayed conservatives on birthright citizenship, and he’s still unhappy. Why? The Supreme Court is not about jurisprudence for Democrats. It’s about dominance. The moment you understand that is the moment you understand every Senate seat is critical, every presidential election a matter of the Constitution versus the whims of wokeness.

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