Joe Biden told reporters in Philadelphia on Election Day that while he was “not a fan of court-packing” and thought it was not the “way to go,” he was “open” to “anything” that a panel of “scholars” might recommend to change the Supreme Court.
Democrats have urged that the Supreme Court be expanded beyond nine seats, and that the new vacancies be filled with liberal justices, an idea referred to as “packing the court.”
Biden opposed the idea in 2019, but was noncommittal in the closing days of the 2020 campaign, when Democrats openly threatened to pack the Court if Republicans approved a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (which they did, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett).
As Breitbart News noted Monday:
At one point, Biden even agreed that voters did not “deserve” to know his position on court-packing. Later, he told an ABC News town hall that he would provide an answer before Election Day. Instead, he said he would set up a “bipartisan” group to study the issue for 180 days, then make a decision in the first year of his presidency, if he were to win the election.
After one of his advisers publicly supported term limits for Supreme Court justices, Biden said he did not — but then endorsed the same proposal for term limits that his adviser had backed.
As he spoke to MSNBC Tuesday, he was asked — since it was Election Day — what his stance on packing the Court was, since he had promised to give one, but had been “hesitant.”
The following exchange ensued:
Reporter: We’re in the final day of the election. And I know that the one thing you have been hesitant to tell voters about is your stance on expanding the Supreme Court, but you did say you would tell them before the election. So here we are, are you open to expanding the Supreme Court?
Biden: Well, I have told them. I told them two weeks ago. and that is that I’m still not a fan of court-packing, I don’t think that’s the way to go. But what I’ve done, I’m going to do, if I win, once I’m declared winner, we’re going to put together a group of constitutional scholars — liberal, conservative, and mainstream scholars — who in fact are going to make recommendations to me within 180 days of what, if anything, should be done to augment or change the way in which the courts now function, within the Constitution. And depending what they have to say, I may in fact adopt it, may not adopt any of it. But there’s a whole lot of things that have been put out there, from great universities like the University of Pennsylvania Law School and other great law schools —
Reporter: But you would be open to anything that they might come up with?
Biden: I’m open to what they think, what they say.
President Donald Trump criticized Biden in a speech near Biden’s childhood hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania on Monday, saying that he had not told voters his stance on packing the Court, nor released a list of potential judicial appointees.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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