Tell your Senators to Balance Our Supreme Court: Pass The Judiciary Act

Call BOTH of your Senators.

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Senator Laphonza Butler

DC Office: 202-224-3841

Email (use your own words): Sen. Butler’s email contact form

Senator Alex Padilla

SF Office: (415) 981-9369

DC Office: (202) 224-3553

Email (use your own words): Sen. Padilla’s email contact form

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Call Script

My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.

You know that Senator McConnell kept our Supreme Court at eight seats for almost an entire year, preventing our first Black president from appointing one of its justices. He then created an exemption to the filibuster to push three highly partisan Federalist Society judicial activists onto the Supreme Court, using reckless procedures to overcome valid objections to those nominees. Passing the Judiciary Act would be far less radical and far more democratic than McConnell’s actions, so we urge you to rebalance our Supreme Court by passing the Judiciary Act as soon as possible.

Background

While sheltered Washington bureaucrats and pundits have been publicly pretending SCOTUS was a neutral arbiter of our Constitution, Republicans have conducted a long-running right-wing scheme to capture the Supreme Court, funded with hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending. As Indivisible National notes, “Every single issue we care about comes down to the courts. Conservatives understand how important the courts are in blocking progress and protecting conservative interests. That’s why they want to get and keep control of the judiciary to ensure they can achieve their preferred outcomes in court—by turning the judiciary into a partisan circus.”

The Federalist Society has been at the forefront of conservative efforts to capture our courts and now six of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices are members. The Society was established in 1982 with the help of close Reagan aides like Ed Meese, with the aim of training and promoting conservative lawyers. Its ranks soon filled the federal bench, when Reagan became the first president since Franklin Roosevelt to appoint more than half of the federal judiciary. Since then, under the leadership of Leonard Leo, it has supported right-wing organizations that have funneled millions of dollars of dark money into campaigns to capture our courts. Ninety percent of Trump’s Appellate judges were members of the Society. In response to criticism that Trump’s judicial nominations were all outsourced to the Federalist Society, White House Legal Counsel Don McGahn quipped, “That is completely false. I’ve been a member of the Federalist Society since law school. Still am. So, frankly, it seems like it’s been in-sourced.”

It’s distressing that some Democratic consultants maintain the public posture that SCOTUS is a hallowed nonpartisan institution, even after what SCOTUS did to our democracy during President Obama’s term. The Republican-appointed justices opened the floodgates to unlimited spending in Citizens’ United v. FEC in 2010 and gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013’s Shelby v. Holder decision. And who can forget Senator McConnell’s contribution to unbalancing SCOTUS by inventing a new Senate rule to deny our first Black president the chance to appoint a Supreme Court Justice by inventing a new Senate rule. (The same rule he broke after Justice Ginsburg’s death in 2019.)

The Trump presidency made matters even worse. Senator McConnell created a carve-out in the filibuster for judicial nominees. He reduced the time normally accorded to confirmations and ignored objections to his unorthodox procedures to install three more Federalist Society partisan judicial activists onto our Supreme Court. Anonymous individual checks as large as $17 million funded Supreme Court confirmation battle advertising, with no way to know what business those donors had before the Court.

With a six–three Republican supermajority, the Supreme Court is deciding cases in a consistently partisan, anti-democracy, pro-corporate direction. Even so, the treasured myth of a nonpartisan SCOTUS dies hard. President Biden gathered a bipartisan commission in April 2021 that reviewed the ample evidence of the need for changes to the Court but avoided taking a position on many of the most controversial suggestions for changing the court. Its December report stated unequivocally that Congress does have the power to enlarge the court, but took no position on doing so.

The evidence is clear. We need to restore balance to the Court. Adding seats to the Court is straightforward, constitutional, and grounded in history. All it takes is a bill passed by Congress and signed by the President, like the Judiciary Act of 2021. And there’s nothing new about the idea of adding seats to the Supreme Court. The framers left it to Congress to decide how many justices sit on the Court, and Congress has changed the number of justices six times throughout history.

Indivisible National considers unrigging the courts to be an essential component of our democracy reform agenda. Demand Justice is another activist group working to build national support for court reform. The Alliance for Justice, a national association of 120 organizations, has been advocating for a fair and independent justice system since 1979.