[Jim Lindgren] Proposed Constitutional Amendment Against Packing the Supreme Court

Ilya Somin raises the issue of packing the Supreme Court. To foreclose that possibility, I am proposing a constitutional amendment to prevent Congress from passing a statute to pack the US Supreme Court with more than nine members. If one party gains control of the White House and both houses of Congress, such a move is at least a possibility in the current degraded political atmosphere. If a party successfully packs the Court (as FDR tried to do during the New Deal), such an act would likely lead to yet more packing the next time that the other party controlled the White House and Congress. To prevent such a tit-for-tat escalation, I propose that Congress should immediately pass and submit to the states for ratification a constitutional amendment to prevent increasing the size of the Supreme Court (and to undo any packing that happens before ratification). I cannot predict how the politics of this would play out, but I would imagine that any member of Congress who refused to…

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