Can Structural Changes Fix the Supreme Court?

摘要

The analysis here does not lend itself easily to an urgent call for legislative action-if anything, it suggests that the court's "crisis" is more imagined than real. To be sure, confidence in the court is down from historic highs, the confirmation process is becoming more contentious, justices' votes are more easily predictable based on the party of their appointing president, and average tenures are growing longer. But the normative implications of all those trends are ambiguous. For a moment in the fall of 2020, it looked like the nation might be gearing up for a partisan battle over court reform, with Democrats potentially seeking to add additional justices so as to reverse the current court's conservative lean. But in the aftermath of the November 2020 election, that possibility now seems distant. The court's conservative majority appears to have raised its standing among liberals and moderates by quickly dispatching a Republican-backed lawsuit seeking to undo Democrat Joe Biden's 2020 electoral victory (Greenhouse 2020). While it was not yet certain as of this writing which party will control the Senate for the next two years, it is highly unlikely that Democrats will have the necessary votes to push a court-packing plan through the upper chamber (Stracqualursi 2020).