We Need To Talk About Court Expansion

It's back to school season, and this year 5 million children across Texas are going to be greeted by the 10 commandments in their classrooms.

Yes, you heard that right.

“Texas politicians passed a law requiring the 10 commandments in every public school classroom, forcing their religion on every kid in those schools.”

28 families in Texas supported by Americans United for Separation of Church and State are taking the fight to the Supreme Court. And they need you to amplify their voices before the Supreme Court gets a chance on this case, and we all know what the fifth circuit did.

Obviously, they let Texas get away with all of this.

They're going to go up, but we're going to fight to get them taken down. That's Texas Public School Parent Ted Low.

“Ted and Rebecca Low are an interfaith couple, Ted is Jewish and Rebecca is Christian, and their kids are in Texas Public Schools.”

The story they tell in this video is moving, and we hope everyone hears and shares it.

Look, there is a human cost of Christian nationalist policies, like these 10 commandments laws, and the decisions the Supreme Court hands down.

Every child deserves access to public education, where they aren't subject to state and pose religion or religious instruction or coercion. Public education is supposed to be open and available to everyone. It's supposed to foster pluralism, not one specific religion. Visit AU.org/10C to learn more about this case and how you can help join the fight to protect church-state separation. We talked a little bit about this case on our regular episode last week, but there's so much more to be said, and to learn about the people who are fighting back.

Let's keep the justice by police and court. It's no joke, but when I argue, man argues against you beautiful ladies like this, there's going to have a last word. She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity, she said, "I ask no favor for my sex, all I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet or for my next." [Music] Hello and welcome back to Strix scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. I'm Keisha, your loan host for this episode of our special bonus series, which we're calling Hot Supreme Court Reform September.

And for this installment of our series, I am delighted to be joined by friend of the show, Jamal Booye, columnist for the New York Times, and probably the person whose columns appear more frequently than anything else in our recurring favorite things segment at the end of every show. It's like we really shout out your columns so much Jamal, it's ridiculous. We really do. Thank you and welcome to Strix scrutiny. It's a pleasure to be here. As I just mentioned, we are doing a series about Supreme Court Reform. And our goal in doing that is to try to shift a little bit from general criticism of the court and its decisions and listeners to this podcast know that that is not in short supply on this platform.

But to try to move a little bit or to include some conversations with leading thinkers about specific potential reforms to the Supreme Court. And today I want to just ask you about one of the biggest and most controversial potential reforms to the court and that is court expansion. Maybe we can call it court packing, we will talk about terminology. But before we get to that, I want to just stay on the court more generally for a minute. And I do think that people and maybe a growing number of people understand that something is deeply wrong with this Supreme Court.

There was a Gallup poll in late July that had Supreme Court approval at 33% other polls have it in the mid or sometimes high 30s, but all at or near historic lows. And while I do think Scotus polling is quite imperfect, the change over time is still quite striking. So Jamal, I'm curious if you have any theories or thoughts on why the court is polling so badly right now.

“I think the two immediate things right are first that people would identify as Democrats, people would identify as liberals have gotten very down on the court for reasons I think all listeners know.”

One interesting wrinkle here is that there are many Republican leading voters who don't think the court has been favorable enough to Donald Trump, and so that kind of structures there view. It's also the case on the right, the political right. It's just like almost a tradition of court hating that charges back half a century. It's part of the language of the political right in a way that it isn't quite yet of the political left. And I think that also shapes how Republican leading voters and conservatives think about the court.

Obviously, I think that the conservative complaint here is absurd. The complaint there is the court is in partisan enough, and I think that the complaint from Democrats liberals and the pendants is much more sound, which is that the court is extremely disruptive in a way that is overturning people's sense of what constitutes sort of like the the status quo of American politics.

And so when voters elected Donald Trump in 2016 or at least when you know 48.1% of voters voted for Donald Trump in 2016, there wasn't an expectation that the consequences of that choice would be the end of Roby Wade right.

“But it was that was the direct consequence of that choice. And I think that for a lot of voters, they are perturbed by the idea that this institution, which is remote and opaque.”

You know, most people cannot name more than a handful of members of the court. Most people do not know how the court works.

I spent a lot of time talking about the court in various forums and the level of just baseline knowledge about its basic operations is not that great. The court is this remote distant institution that every six months they learn has suddenly overturned some right they thought they had. I think that is driving a lot of the discontent among Americans broadly they just don't like that idea.

It strikes even if they could articulate it in these terms it strikes them as inimical to how they think the American system is supposed to work.

“Yeah, and I think the disruptiveness is a good way to characterize it.”

I mean, just back up for a second, like I think you're right, you make a good point about the polling, which is that they're strikingly low numbers, but obviously you disaggregate them and it is a combination of I think really sound criticism of the court and then some pretty baseless like they're not Trumpy enough. Regardless, like that this is an institution that is not commanding a lot of support and confidence in the public. I think that's a really nice point, but the disruptiveness I think is also critical because I think it's such a mistake to focus on like how many Supreme Court opinions this Supreme Court has overruled.

That is a metric, but it is a wildly under-inclusive one for asking about just the disruptiveness of the basic operations of government. I mean, the court thankfully did not, but came very close to upending the way that a lot of states do mail in voting in the upcoming midterm elections, like it didn't do that, but if it had done that, that would have been wildly disruptive to dozens of states that let people cast votes by mail and then have those votes counted even if they arrive a couple of days after the election.

And that's not about like overruling a prior precedent. That's just about a court being willing to invite chaos and into elections, I think in particular, but obviously it goes way beyond elections, destabilizing the way that federal agencies have been able to regulate, you know, the pollution of the air and the water undermining the ability of the education department and the president to give debt relief to student borrowers. I mean, obviously the list is long, but I do think that it's kind of united by this disinterest in allowing other institutional players to make important choices.

And the settled state of affairs in terms of how we do governance to sort of rest if the Supreme Court and it's often very idiosyncratic concept of like the separation of powers doesn't like the way things have been going. And I do think there's one other thing in this connection, the kind of disrupting elections and democracy piece, which is that obviously there is wild dissatisfaction for lots of different reasons in kind of how government is working for people. I justify it and some of it less justified, but I do wonder whether in different ways people are beginning to understand that the court actually is an important player and bears a heavy dose of responsibility in their dissatisfaction with the way government is operating.

And I don't know if anecdotally in your conversations about the court, you're seeing that kind of shift in people's minds, but as remote and distant as the Supreme Court is compared to other branches of government,

it feels like to agree the presence of the court in a lot of court choices that people are allowed to make in ways they live their lives.

“It's becoming a little bit more evident to people. Does that seem right?”

No, that seems right. And one of the things I have learned in being a journalist and just like talking to people both in my capacity of the journalists and then in the past when I would volunteer for campaigns and stuff and just talk to people. Ordinary people don't necessarily have a precise language for describing things and they will latch on to basically like signifiers that kind of are getting at what they want to express even if they can't say it. And so I would say that the signifier for like I am upset with the court is citizens united. It is a stand-in for someone, there's this unaccountable power that is allowing bad things to happen.

You know, legal nerds might say, yeah, you know, since united don't really agree with it, but like it's hard to see how they could come to a different outcome, like legal nerds will have their discussion about the case as a case. But for like the typical person, what citizens united means is the Supreme Court let billionaires buy our elections.

And you want to express this outright that like they are basically floating above the entire political system as like a guardian counsel to whom they have no responsibility.

“I think a lot of voters of Americans perceive them to be like this. And citizens united, the sense that there are other unaccountable money and politics, that's the thing that I think captures the discontent.”

Yeah, more than anything else, more than honestly even dops. It's citizens united as a multiplicity of people's tongues. That's really interesting. And that's you know, 16 years. It's it is really interesting to me how a decision like that has the kind of staying power that it has.

And I think you're right that there are there are people who say like, oh, there's reason arguments on both sides of citizens united. Like I am definitely not in that camp. I think it was an outrage.

And I do think that it's it's striking and encouraging actually that the public has stayed as mad as it has about that opinion, which has a lot to do with the state of our politics today. So okay, so I've been asking about people's perception of the Supreme Court and I want to slightly tweak the question now and to ask you kind of how you would characterize if it's different from what we've been talking about what is so wrong with the Supreme Court today. Because I do think that that seems important to identifying what any effort at reform should be trying to address. So like what are the key kind of pathologies or problems with a court that any court reform should be targeting.

There's a piece from about four years ago nearly four years ago by Mark Lemley called be Imperial Supreme Court, which has really been my touchstone for thinking about this.

“So I remember reading this and being like, yeah, this is this captures the dynamic that I think is most problematic and the argument of the piece basically is that the aim of the currency or the Robert's Court.”

What the Robert's Court has been doing primarily is accumulating power for itself, accumulating the power basically to make exceptions and to decide. And so when you begin to look at various rulings in Trump vus is comes after this but Trump vus is a very good example. The headlight of Trump vus is the Supreme Court has created this criminal immunity for the presidency as it relates to the president's core duties.

But the thing about that right is that Robert's never quite says what that constitutes, what constitutes an official act, what constitutes an unofficial act.

What are the exact limits of the core duties of the presidency? He provides an outline, but it's not specific, it's not exact. It has a lot of room for discretion. And that room for discretion is room for the court, right? It's room for the Supreme Court to decide what it thinks.

“Much more explicit than that is even the major questions doctrine, which to my mind just really seems like a vibe space. I don't know seems like you should be able to do that kind of doctrine.”

And you see this again and again, the court not actually laying down clear standards for lower courts to follow. That if the clear standards were there, lower courts could make their decisions without intervention from the Supreme Court. What you see is the court laying out vague doctrines that it can then intervene on a case by case basis when it decides to lower court is not behave in exactly the way it wants it to. The use of the shadow docket is, again, part of this, this accumulation of authority within the court.

And so that, that really structures my sense of what is to be done and it goes back to a point I made earlier about the basic lack of democratic accountability of the court has. Obviously, the Supreme Court is one of the, you know, principle countermajoritarian institutions of the American system. But the extent to which it remains responsive to the political process responsive to sort of like democratic need waxes and wins throughout history. And there are times when the court is actually quite responsive to what's happening on the ground in times when it's very remote and unresponsive to what's happening on the ground.

And I think that part of the reform agenda has to be done with an eye towards kind of how do you democratize the court or how do you just make the court more democratically responsive. How do you how do you break up its own authority relative to the rest of the federal judiciary and as well as the political system to kind of bring it back down from 30,000 feet and as a live player within the political system. Some of that is discretionary choices, right? If I were, you know, advising a president about here's my ambition not if I were president if I were advising a president about who to put on the court.

This does not instinctually, elite lawyers and executive branch lawyers just instinctively does not do. I would be, you know, I think we should have court expansion that's that's if I'm beyond is a very narrowly political thing like I just doing the process by which the Republican majority was assembled is like right with illegitimacy, you know,

my no-retarian president, appointing three justices, one of those justices being appointed in the process that basically should have like broke the confirmation process for a year.

The fact that the Republican majority in the Senate set down a rule, no confirmations in the election year, then promptly dropped that rule when they had a chance to do a confirmation election rule. All those things, it's just like not fair play, right? It's in, never put it, it's hardball and I do think that hardball is is appropriate in response, but if I'm thinking big picture about just rejuring the court's relationship to the political system, the court relationship to the larger federal judiciary.

The court forms would look like first, I'll much larger expansion over a longer time horizon with term limits and staggered additions. So it's not like, you know, let's say you're doubling or tripling the size of the court, 27, it wouldn't be 18 new members immediately, right? And then every president after that gets a set number of per term, a set number of appointments. And so it's still, it's still responsive to the political process and with term limits, none of these appointments are permanent.

“So you can try to game the system and as a parenthetical, I think part of the thing that perturbs me the most about the current structure of the court is that it can be gained, right?”

We turned into a thing where you just permanently lock in authority for the duration.

And I think that's just corrosive to democracy, which is a system predicated basically on the idea that you can always lose or rather no witness permanent, no defeat is permanent, right?

And the prospect of permanent victories, if they become possible is a really distorting thing in a political system, like a democratic system. Eliminating the chance for permanent victories, introducing more randomness into the process into the structure, I think actually fixes a lot of problems. If you have this 27 member court built over the course of what like five presidential terms. So first of all, you know, and knows who's going to have to be able to really construct it.

But second, at a court that large, you can begin to do, you know, instead of a whole court hearing cases, panels of justices here cases.

Randomly selected from amongst the members. And that, again, introduces kind of this element of chance that becomes much harder to gain. And I think that's important. Yeah. So let me, let me, let's like, so that's no, so that's you are literally like speaking our love language, which is like, let's do all of the reforms and to situate this a little bit.

“Okay, so in terms of the problem to be addressed through these reforms, I think that you kind of touched on all the teachers of it.”

Both too much power vague doctrines that reserve enormous discretion to the court that these pro presidency decisions are hugely consequential in what they hand to the president, but also in what they reserve for the court. Both as the ultimate orbiter of the extent of congressional control over the president, but also I do feel like there's this subtle way that the pro presidency decisions by just announcing that any government actor can stand outside the law. Like also implicitly announced that the court stands outside of legal checks, like there, you know, it's both and.

And that kind of the imperative here is to democratize the court to limit some of this unchecked power to break up the authority as compared to both the lower courts and the other branches of government. And that there needs to be an approach that has a lot of different components. And we are sort of talked about talking about expansion, but I think you're exactly right to say the way to think about expansion is not as a one off.

“We're going to put four more justices on the court right now because you need to fix the current court because it will never let anything good stand and because.”

You know, it's sort of illegitimate in its current constitution because maybe of the appointment of both gorsage at the beginning of and buried at the end of the first Trump term, but that that actually just has to be part of a larger reform conversation. I'm going to actually think away. So maybe maybe the Trump one experience is part of the story, but it also think the kind of critical reason that there needs to be expansion at the beginning of rolling in kind of a growing court with term limits is.

I'm just not sure these nine justices would allow that. So I gather, so say you have four justices appointed immediately and then.

Four for each successive presidency and then also term limits so you don't have a growing court that becomes an enormous although I'm not sure that would be so bad or court is kind of small in comparison to other kind of comparable democracy is and you could do panels of this or you were just a leading to.

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So I think that that kind of larger package of reforms is exactly the right way to approach it to stay though for a minute just on the kind of expansion question.

“Some of these reform proposals have constitutional objections that can be raised to them return limits is obviously in some ways the one that people think is the inchiest constitutionally.”

Size is not right like the Supreme Court is created by the constitution but the constitution says literally not a word about the size of the court.

That's just a creature of ordinary statute so a statute currently sets the size at nine it could set it at some smaller number or some larger number.

It's been six it's been five it's been ten it's now been nine for 150 ish years but this part of any reform proposal should not be remotely.

“Constitutionally suspect statute could change the size of the court.”

So so I want to talk for a little bit more detail about that but actually I said at the beginning I wanted to talk about nomenclature and I forgot to come back to that so I just kind of want to ask.

Growing the court is part of a reform agenda like what do you think is the most constructive way to kind of describe that is a court expansion court packing. Expanding in beginning like what what what what what should we call it and what do you call it when you think about it. Yeah, I think calling it court expansion and I haven't been calling it Supreme Court expansion I really have been calling court expansion because the other part of this for me is just a larger expansion and the entire federal judiciary this is a bit of a hobby horse of mine.

But the last major expansion of the whole judiciary was in 1979 the United States had about 220 million people right we have a third more people US judicial conference is always complaining about the fact that there are too many cases it takes too long for things to make their make it's way through the process. Americans they have to wait for years for cases to be heard it is you know if we have a constitutional right to a speedy trial the bottlenecks in the current system. That right they make it to that right isn't really being something that people can can expect especially if they like resources so I've been thinking about this as the Supreme Court expansion is actually being subordinate to a larger expansion the entire federal judiciary for very technocratic reasons we just need more judges we need more judges we need more courts to do more things now on the political level there is like advantages to this right if what you want to do for example is dilute the influence of Donald Trump on the federal judiciary.

On the federal judiciary then expanding the size of the judiciary by a third would do it right expanding your creating new circuits several circuits already are enormous split them up and make the new circuits and you can do a thing right where you say well for every circuit there has to be too just to associate it with it so that gives you kind of a peg for your overall court expansion Supreme Court expansion but the idea here for political reasons is actually to say to the public. This isn't everyone knows this is somewhat about the politics of the court but this is also about your ability to exercise your rights in the court of law your ability to to get a speedy trial your ability to have a judge hear your case and we need to alleviate the bottlenecks and so expanding vastly expanding the number of judges across the board allows us to do that.

And I mean the funny thing is is that like plenty of people have thoughts about Supreme Court expansion not a single person thinks about the larger federal judiciary expansion like it's not politically salient anyway. And it might actually be the more significant reform because as we're experiencing right now it is the trial courts that have been the most effective institutional barrier to authoritarian consolidation and I think it's important recognizing that to bolster the trial courts. The other aspect of this is that I think one of the problems with the Supreme Court is it just doesn't hear enough cases like I think part of the reason why you get the justice sort of like using about their Baroque berries is that they just like have too much time on their hands.

And so a larger court more judges on law courts might mean more turn more cases with the Supreme Court to handle instead of 60 year 120 a year and that may.

“I think that would have I think it would be good if it could be good for the Supreme Court.”

There's like an idle hands are the dumbest play thing argument here absolutely it could be good to have them much more focused on kind of ordinary work ordinary legal work. Right that's turning through the system rather than the rules for the ages like I think I mean just just this is I feel like this is, you know, obviously we're progressives here.

That's that's why you're there and so show some humility they have not show some recognition that you are a servant of the public and not some kind of you know judicial wizard.

“It's for the same reason I'm gonna ramble a total in here if for the same reason why I think that their papers should be the property of the United States and should be released on the end of their term like no hoarding papers.”

It's not yours belong belongs to the public some kind of you know a judicial records act as an appendage to like a big package of Supreme Court reforms I think would be. Totally appropriate yeah people just might not realize that unlike the presidential records act which trump obviously thinks is unconstitutional but which does. Set forth the principle that the papers the official papers of the presidency are the property of the public and that subject to complex statutory regime like go into.

The national archives and our ultimately accessible to the public in various ways we don't have that for the courts like the justices have complete control over whether they.

Provide their papers the library of congress or some other place or literally set them ablaze if they choose like it's wild. And so and that that that is intolerable and I think it's right it is just a small but really significant example of the kind of hubris that we see on display like they think that. They cannot be regulated the way other institutional actors can and they're just officials who serve in government like so many officials are serving the executive branch and the legislative branch and they have of course like distinct kinds of authorities.

“But they don't view themselves as fundamentally public servants and that's an enormous problem and I think that's why at a high level.”

Just reasserting political control over an institution that has attempted to basically like slip the bonds of all political controls and really dangerous ways is critical and so I do like the idea of court expansion and a package that the court is part of. I wonder whether you worry about packaging of that way about the potential historical parallels to you know in 1937 when FDR famously. Proposes and then pursues and ultimately doesn't get this court packing plan through congress. One of the justifications given is that well the justices are overworked and so we need to put more justices on the court and like that was not the justification the reason that FDR wanted to change the court was because it was striking down.

Critical new deal legislation and so and I wonder I don't I have such mixed feelings about how to understand that historical.

So I guess I guess I'll just you know sometimes we think we'll after our failed he didn't pack the court. Sometimes we think well he ultimately succeeded because he got the court to blink and stop striking down this new deal legislation. But then the counter argument to that counter argument is like maybe it was a failure because ultimately the court was still in control. The court said all right we will change course, but we are still the ultimate designers were just going to hand down more defensible decisions and we didn't fundamentally recalibrate power that shifted it away from the Supreme Court in two elected officials in ways that we are we are still kind of like seeing the effects of.

So I guess I'm curious you know you're a student of history like what you make of that historical episode.

“As far as the politics of it I think it's important to recognize there that it was somewhat abrupt right it was there are several rulings and quick succession.”

That are frustrating the new deal agenda and then FDR who is not ran run on court expansion who is not talking about the Supreme Court or something like oh well they're overworked and we need to do something about that. It's just unconvincing rationale for what was clearly a power move I think and the other part of it as well is that you know this is has to be understood in terms of FDR's own force of personality force will efforts to sort of consolidate more government within the executive branch.

For me at least I think one has to think of court reform not as a way of getting rid of impediments to the presidency but as a way of dealing with potential impediments to Congress being able to act right Congress being able to legislate on behalf of the people who put them there. And part of my larger vision you might say for post Trump reform is beginning to reassert the primacy of Congress in leading the government and that's everything from you know bolstering Congress is capacity to make policy bolstering Congress is ability to do investigations right sort of decentralizing power within Congress itself.

You know I've read proposals about beginning to think about basically moving the administrative state into the legislature as a way of getting around current Supreme Court doctrine, but also again to bolster Congress's ability to make law and to act.

Democrats saying oh look how look how hard they're working you may need more it much more it's the it's the judges themselves it's John Robert himself writing about the barriers to timely judicial work in the current judiciary. So for me it's just sort of what else to take that serious. Yeah, let's let's take the complaints of the judges themselves seriously and provide them with relief and relief necessarily takes the form of just more people and there's also. I mean they're all kind of other reforms you can let that fall under this so there's you know the immigration courts which are not article three courts are right with problems is you currently filled with a bunch of people shouldn't be there.

“And so I think that's the case in the case is make the immigration courts article three courts right sort of like bring them under the the auspices of the federal judiciary.”

There's smuggled that into Supreme Court reform or smuggled Supreme Court reform into that like you know, but I do think that the judges themselves are actually providing the rationale for doing this.

Yeah. And I think you're right that's a really important distinction from the kind of D R episode and I'm not sure which way the smuggling runs or if it's even smuggling at all like if I think I think that situating at a larger court expansion federal court expansion that is not just Supreme Court expansion.

“Effort that also has a lot of other components I think seems both really smart and maybe good politics but also like good governance and like it's really nice when those things all align like that would be great.”

It does feel like this is the kind of thing that again, all of these reforms that we're talking about our creatures of statute like none of these are remotely constitutionally questionable so all this could be done.

Through ordinary legislation it would maybe mean probably mean I'm killing the filibuster and then passing this kind of thing through the ordinary legislative process I guess.

A question I have is some or maybe many components of say a big reform package of legislation. I could imagine this Supreme Court perceiving as threats to its authority because that is fundamentally what they would be and finding ways to strike down some or all of a reform package that we might imagine and I guess how do you think about. Whether that should inform thinking about how to put together a package, I mean somebody's that this is a fundamental problem if this is a court that is has not acknowledged checks on its own power and is unlikely to look favorably on efforts to to check it a fresh and yet that is exactly why it's so important that it be checked so I guess I'm curious how we should think about.

And game around the possibility that this court might just try to say no.

I don't that's such a good question. I mean my immediate inclination is kind of to say well let them you know if a democratic Congress you know 53 senators they they make a carve out to the filibuster to allow for judicial reform and pass a big judicial reform package and it's side by the president. And then through some convoluted process I mean who would even have standing here like but there's some convoluted process you know the Supreme Court says oh we don't think this is constitutional.

“Let's have that political battle you know I think that that's not a political battle Supreme Court is going to wait.”

Just kind of they don't have the people right that it's it's one thing to go after you know doctrine to stop us by previous courts it is still another thing it's one thing to even go after executive actions. It's very very different to begin striking down the duly pass acts of Congress especially ones done to regulate you that I think would go be beyond the pale for many Americans and would expose the court to a much worse backlash than I think it's able to handle. But beyond that I suppose you know in passing the legislation Congress and just making explicit constitutional claim right just to say we are doing this under our authority and article three.

We are doing this in accordance with previous Congresses who's authority that's never been questioned right recognizing that as you pointed out case that basically everything about the Supreme Court other than the fact that it exists is structured by statute. It's a building handled to a docket it's size it's building it's clerks it's you know everything is established by statute that is that that's just how it's been spent that's how it's been since the judiciary act of seven's needy nine right.

If you're possible reading of a constitution says that we can do this pass conferences done it nothing about that has changed and then you can go in and add this is not your dishable.

Yeah, yeah that's right to strip the courts ability to even decide cases challenging conferences authority to legislate in in the way that it would be doing here and I also really like that the kind of well.

“And let's have that political fight response because I think that that seems exactly right and that that just seems like it should emboldened policy makers hillstaffers members of Congress to be ambitious.”

And then and to know that like this has this court has been lawless in some instances and there's no guarantee that it would not be volus here especially when it's own kind of skin is in the game in this way.

And that's not a reason to trim your sales in terms of what you're trying to achieve legislatively, so I really really like that maybe one last question is I guess how much do you think.

Jamel candidates for Congress right now in the midterm election cycle once we're past that will be already probably like well into the or it's going to come fast the next presidential election cycle like how much should candidates for the highest offices be talking about the Supreme Court and court reform right now. I think they should be talking about a lot, but that's another way to say I think that people like actual voters need to be asking them about it right like this is voters ask candidates about their plans for health care about their plans for a foreign house or in college all these things.

But there should also be asking candidates about their plan for the Supreme Court about their plan for the federal judiciary if a if a candidate for your house seat your Senate a Senate seat for for the presidency of a primary season of a show up in your town to do a town hall or form you should be asking them what is your plan for this I really think that like I do not think we should have any expectation that candidates for office unless they are themselves already have this ambition.

“Or going to be for the open about this we're going to talk about it because it's snacks of controversy and politicians don't like that so I do think it's up to voters.”

To to grow them it's up for people like us right like if we are in a position to be interviewing candidates to be speaking to candidates on camera to ask straight up what what do you think about this what is your plan for this. Do you support Supreme Court expansion just straight up and kind of force it onto the agenda and make it something that lawmakers have to respond to.

“If lawmakers get the sense that their voters want this to happen that changes the calculation it doesn't mean you get everything that you want but it does mean that everyone kind of feels that you have to do something.”

And that's that's the first part of winning the battle. Indeed. All right. Well having these conversations as our effort to do our small part in making that reality.

I'm so gemel. But we really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. Thank you so much for coming on. I thank you so much for having me. [Music] Strix scrutiny as a crooked media production our show is produced by Melody Raule and Michael Goldsmith music by D Cooper our team includes Matt de Grote and Hethcoat Johanna case Kenny Muffett Adam Lippert and Eric shoot our production staff is proudly unionized with the writers guild of America East. [Music]