Packing it in
Jul 26, 2007 Lex scripta, Medialites
Ann Althouse reports about the New York Times’s proposal 
to pack the Supreme Court under the next (natch) Democratic Administration to dilute the effect of justices the Times doesn’t like. This is, of course, exactly what FDR tried. While even a strongly Democratic Congress blanched at the overreaching then, the justices got the message. The New Deal — along with ten more years of Depression, not to mention the metastasizing of Big Government in all its glory — was ushered in with no more constitutional nit-picking.
The editorial calls court-packing a “hallowed American political tradition,” a great phrase but a false claim. It is not hallowed — one of Ann’s commenters points out that it was last done 130 years ago — and it is certainly not great. It is, above all, remarkably small-minded, and shortsighted.
The Times is utterly running off the rails. (UPDATE: Yup!) Query: Is this increasing thickness to any sensibility outside what Mickey Kaus calls the “echo chamber” a result of its own impending financial doom and its looming cultural obsolescence — a sort of reckless panic? Or is that tunnel vision itself the cause of of the Times’s own dead end?
Hopeful answer: It’s both — what the investment boys call a “death spiral.” For the Times, we can only hope.
July 27th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Good summer reading on overreaching by government: http://www.amityshlaes.com/