Supreme Court Commissioner: To save democracy we must expand it

This sentiment is coming from Kermit Roosevelt III, who served on Biden's Supreme Court commission. He lays out exactly how the Court has already been rigged through Republican tactics. And that rigging is specifically designed to serve an anti-democratic agenda. Therefore to save democracy demands that we expand it. 

Will Biden and the Democratic Party listen and do it or let it happen? Same thing with the filibuster and federal voting rights. These are the stakes in both cases. This is the reality and there's no way around it. Fight for democracy or let it die. It's now or never, no excuses.

"This is a problem of partisan politics. It is the Republican party attacking democracy, and the Supreme Court is helping it. Because it is partisan phenomenon, there is no nonpartisan good-government fix for it. If term limits had been in place earlier, we might not have come to this point, because the Supreme Court would not have facilitated the minoritarian takeover. If term limits are enacted now, they may eventually give us a Court that is again willing to step in to protect democracy, rather than the undermine it. But it is not at all clear that we have the luxury of time.

"The only reform that fixes this problem now is court expansion. That could give us a majority of Justices who would defend democracy against these assaults instead of participating in them. I have always viewed expansion with great skepticism, as a last resort, the fire axe in the glass case on the wall. But we may well be at the point of breaking that glass now. Our constitutional system has produced a playing field that tilts toward the minority. This is not because wise Framers wanted it that way—they didn’t foresee political parties at all. It is because our political divide maps well onto an urban-rural split, so that Democrats tend to control high-population states and Republicans low-population ones. That means that the small-state bias of the Senate and the Electoral college is now a partisan bias. Add in the effects of partisan gerrymanders, and Democrats typically need several percentage points more than a simple majority of the national vote to win. Add in voter suppression and this seems increasingly unlikely. Add in the attempts to delegitimize Democratic victories and the talk of gerrymandered state legislatures rejecting electoral results they don’t like, and the hill gets even steeper. Absent some decisive action, we could be looking at generations of minority control."