Sen. Ed Markey Echoes ‘Pack the Court’ Activists After Abortion Decision Leaks

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) called for Congress to “expand” the Supreme Court on Monday, as activists chanted “pack the Court!” outside the building after a draft decision leaked that would overturn the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision on abortion.

Court-packing refers to the idea of adding seats to the Supreme Court and immediately filling the vacancies with reliably loyal justices. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt threatened to pack the Court in the 1930s; left-wing Democrats revived the idea after the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, which gave the Court a nominal 5-4 conservative majority that has since expanded to 6-3 since Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Markey tweeted that a “stolen, illegitimate, and far-right Supreme Court majority” had to be overcome by packing the Court:

A stolen, illegitimate, and far-right Supreme Court majority appears set to destroy the right to abortion, an essential right which protects the health, safety, and freedom of millions of Americans. There is no other recourse. We must expand the court.

— Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) May 3, 2022

Many Democrats consider the conservative majority illegitimate because they considered President Donald Trump to be so.

They consider the majority “stolen” because a Republican-run Senate refused to hold confirmation proceedings for Merrick Garland, who was President Barack Obama’s choice to replace the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016.

President Joe Biden promised during the 2020 presidential election to convene a commission to consider the idea of packing the Court. After much consideration, the commission concluded last year that the benefits of such a change would be “uncertain,” disappointing many left-wing Democrats.

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). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. 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.