Let me know when researchers want to start lugging around laptops when they go splunking in caves to record bat populations and I'll tell them about the web portal.
It's well known that bat research didn't even exist prior to 2007. Steve Jobs famously took the stage and declared, "I have finally achieved bat research!"
Packing the court is unprecedented, and as soon as anyone did it, they would both do it continuously. It would also outrage the other party and make the first to do it more likely to lose the next election.
So you would get to pack the court for the rest of your current term before the other party gets back in and packs it the other way, and thereafter lose the courts as a check on the party in power forever because the first thing a party would do when they get into power is pack the courts.
As with partisan gerrymandering, packing the court cannot be the only step.
It would need to come with a commitment to a package of difficult to undo (i.e. amendments) reforms. SCOTUS term limits, preventing the Senate from refusing to even consider nominees, bans on justices receiving gifts (https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...), revocation of Presidential immunity, etc. You pack the court with an explicit promise to largely return to the old status quo when it's fixed.
Do you really think that if you packed the court, there is anything you could do to prevent the other party from doing the same thing the next time they're in power? Your plan would have to be to prevent them from ever getting back into power, and that's a civil war.
On top of that, Clarence Thomas is the oldest person on the court and Alito is only two years younger. By the end of the next Presidential term they'll both be in their 80s. You don't have to pack the court, you just have to be in office for the term or two after this one.
That was in a Presidential election year after Obama had already appointed two other Justices and the vacancy was the deciding vote, and Garland was more of a centrist than the previous nominees but was still left-leaning and would have flipped the court. Then they definitely lose if they confirm him but maybe win if there is a President from the other party the next year, and on top of that as long as they held the Senate even if they didn't retake the Presidency they could just confirm Garland in the fall instead of the summer.
That's not what it looks like in most cases. In the first half of any term the next election can't gain you the Presidency but it could lose you the Senate. On top of that, when it isn't the deciding vote, e.g. the first of either Alito or Thomas to be replaced, a moderate is a much better hedge than the coin flip even in the second half of a term, because if you take the moderate and then lose the next election at least you have the moderate in the other party's majority, meanwhile if you win the next election then you keep the majority regardless.
Which is to say, that's only likely to happen in the next few years if it happens for the second of the two Justices in the second half of a Presidential term and the Democrats lose the subsequent Presidential election.
> Do you really think that if you packed the court, there is anything you could do to prevent the other party from doing the same thing the next time they're in power?
I don't think it's 100% possible to stop a determined political movement in the US from doing A Holocaust, but I think it's worth at least trying to make it tough.
The point is your objection also applies to A Holocaust.
We can't 100% prevent anything; the Constitution could get amended to permit mass summary executions, with enough votes and public support. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying to make that tougher to accomplish.
The way you make that tougher to accomplish is by adding more checks and balances or repealing laws granting excessive authority to the executive. Packing the court would de facto remove an important one. The thing that would help that is a constitutional amendment prohibiting court packing.
> But the way you make that tougher to accomplish is by adding more checks and balances or repealing laws granting excessive authority to the executive.
That is what I describe as the "package" of reforms, yes.
> The thing that would help that is a constitutional amendment prohibiting court packing.
Good idea! Pack the court, and in that law, include a trigger provision that repeals it as soon as said amendment is passed.
(This has similarly been proposed in gerrymandering.)
> Good idea! Pack the court, and in that law, include a trigger provision that repeals it as soon as said amendment is passed.
Except then the other party just packs the court again instead of passing the amendment, whereas if you already have the votes to pass the amendment then you would just do that without packing the court.
The idea is to establish a "we can keep the everyone-loses war going, or we can fix it for both of us". It's hardly unprecedented; you're seeing it right now with the decision to reopen the government except DHS.
The real way you do this is by thinking ahead for five minutes. We consistently have the problem that everybody realizes checks and balances are important when the other party is in power but that's when they don't have the ability to institute them, and then they forget all about it the next time they're in power.
The easiest time to reduce executive power is when your party is in the executive branch to sign the bill.
Except that court packing is a purely partisan play where they gain nothing from not reciprocating in kind, whereas they benefit symmetrically from a reduction in executive power for the same reason as you -- it helps them the next time they're in the minority. And the symmetrical move wouldn't be to re-grant those powers to the executive, it would be to further limit the executive from unilaterally doing some things the other party doesn't think it should be doing.
The best case scenario would be to somehow get both parties actually targeting the other's corruption instead of just trying to get the votes needed to be the ones sticking the money in their own pockets.
It's more like "Mom, he punched me after I punched him after he punched me after I punched him after he punched me after..."
Nobody would have cared about Texas' gerrymandering except for Trump (stupidly) called for it - pretty much every political party has done it in their state over the years, but it's generally been gently putting their finger on the scale. But now that someone that half of the country have been convinced is literally Hitler had a part in it they feel like they can go absolutely wild with it. Everyone should be mad when gerrymandering happens, whether it helps your side or not. Representatives that feel absolutely secure in their seats are bad at their jobs, whether they're on your side or not. Going so hogwild in 'retribution' isn't virtuous.
Because the Texas redistricting hopes to bring the Democrats seats down from 13 to to 8, but a lot of those could still easily go either way. California made theirs to also pick up 5 but theirs are more sure. Virginia is the real whopper, where a purple state will move to all seats but one for Democrats instead of the reasonable almost down the middle split they now have.
I'm not defending what was done in Texas. Gerrymandering is gross. But I do hate how the discourse seems to be that Texas started it. They absolutely didn't. Neither party can be blamed for that, and this tit and tat back and forth is the wrong way to deal with it - so are so called "nonpartisan" committees, by the way. It's easy for a nonpartisan committee to quickly become quite partisan. What I wish would have happened is that there was a real dialogue about better fixes for the problem, but instead it became political mudslinging.
Easy part solution - put mathematical limits on the geometry. It wouldn't eliminate gerrymandering but it would certainly help.
It may also have been because of the end of the de minimis ($800) tariff exemption. Without that exemption, even something valued at one cent would have to go through the import-tax collection process, which meant that small packages were no longer economical to send. That exemption is still gone.
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