Pete Buttigieg is putting an ambitious, long-shot plan to reform the Supreme Court front-and-center of his campaign.
WASHINGTON — As Democrats agonize over a spate of state laws restricting abortion rights and even a potential reversal of Roe v. Wade, one 2020 presidential candidate is putting an ambitious, long-shot plan to reform the Supreme Court front-and-center of his campaign.
“The reform of not just expanding the number of members but doing it in a way where some of them are selected on a consensus, nonpartisan basis, it’s a very promising way to do it,” Buttigieg said. “There may be others. But the point is, we've got to get out of where we are now, where any time there is an opening, there is an apocalyptic, ideological firefight. It harms the court, it harms the country and it leads to outcomes like we have right now.
Buttigieg says it’s rooted in a forthcoming paper in the Yale Law Journal by law professors Daniel Epps of Washington University in St. Louis and Ganesh Sitaraman of Vanderbilt Law School. Buttigieg and Sitaraman met as fellow undergraduate students at Harvard University and became friends. The idea is similar to what’s used in commercial arbitration, a system to resolve business disputes, in which each side gets to pick one arbitrator they trust, and those two arbitrators then jointly pick a third neutral arbitrator who acts as the swing vote.
Simply increasing the number of justices can be done simply by passing a federal law. In fact, the number of justices has varied in U.S. history, though it’s remained at nine since 1870. If there are political pitfalls to be avoided in pursuing a Supreme Court overhaul, then FDR’s attempt is the cautionary tale. After winning re-election in 1936, he tried to push through a plan to add more justices to the court in an era that was"like the present context on steroids,” says Jeff Shesol, author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court.”
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