TN Senator Marsha Blackburn Has Ferreted Out Dastardly Dem Plot To Pack SCOTUS ... With Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
That dog won't hunt.
Senator Marsha Blackburn has an active fantasy life. And not just on Twitter!
Ummm, okay.*
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Yesterday the Tennessee Republican gave an EXCLUSIVE interview to The Daily Caller. The senator was, as usual, uninhibited by objective facts and/or reality. Her theory appears to be that Democrats are going to rush Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson onto the Supreme Court in an attempt to save Roe v. Wade from Justice Alito’s monstrous opinion, which leaked to Politico Monday night.
“In April [President Biden] did sign those commission papers appointing her to the court. And I think it’s going to be interesting to see if the left starts pushing Justice Roberts to seat Judge Jackson because they are trying to push the balance of the court. They’re trying to pack the court. They’re trying to expand the court,” Blackburn said.
Leave aside for the moment that Chief Justice Roberts seems open to laying waste to the trimester framework laid out in Casey, effectively mooting Roe, which would still make this a 6-4 decision. Math is the least of the problems here.
“There is a framework in place that should keep that from happening. But what we have to be aware of is that the Democrats are taking unprecedented actions,” Blackburn went on. “And when you look at what has transpired, when you have Chuck Schumer out there attempting to intimidate or threaten or silence the court and undermine its legitimacy, that is something that is of concern.”
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And lo, lightning did not strike her down on the spot for pretending that Mitch McConnell didn’t hold Justice Scalia’s seat open for an entire year, and threaten to shrink the court permanently if Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
Let’s be clear here, if the shoe were on the other foot, Republicans would do exactly what Blackburn is suggesting and call it the Kamala Rule. But that is never going to happen under this president and this congress, as this member of the Senate Judiciary Committee knows full well. That won’t stop her from fear mongering about nefarious Democrats assaulting the court by saying that an opinion which jettisons 50 years of precedent is total bullshit, though.
“This week he (Schumer) has been active in trying to undermine the legitimacy of the court and his comment about ‘everything being on the table.’ I just think it is smart for us to be mindful and watchful,” she intoned ominously, before going on to willfully mischaracterize the opinion.
“I do think it’s important to note this is not something that would ban abortion. I’ve been surprised that so many activists on the left have referenced what they saw in the Alito draft and have made it sound that this would be an end to abortion,” she said, as if outlawing abortion would do anything but make it less safe for poor women to obtain one. “But that is incorrect. What this would do is return the issue of restrictions on abortion to the states.”
Which is a fun way of talking around the reality that existing trigger laws and un-repealed pre-Roe statutes still on the books would make an abortion outright illegal from conception or beyond the first trimester for roughly half the women in America. And that is not a popular position in a country where roughly 60 percent of the population supports the right to access a legal abortion in at least some circumstances. So Marsha Blackburn has conveniently moved the goal posts, waving away that her party — which hasn’t won a majority in a presidential election since 2004 and routinely controls Congress despite getting fewer votes than Democrats — engineered a conservative takeover of the courts promising to do exactly this.
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But it’s the Democrats threatening the legitimacy of the Court, right?
*Yes, there are stories about drug cartels using TikTok to entice Mexican kids into a life of crime. There are also stories about Facebook paying a Republican PR firm to plant stories about its rival TikTok tying it to China. So, make of it what you will.
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
