Former judge Ken Starr told Newsmax TV on Monday that President Joe Biden’s creation of a commission that will explore expanding the U.S. Supreme Court is "a bad idea," adding that Biden "is no" former President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The White House announced Friday that Biden would sign an executive order creating a bipartisan commission "to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals," and "the membership and size of the Court."
The move comes as some Democrats push Biden to expand the number of seats on the Supreme Court, a decision that Starr says would be a mistake.
Starr told "John Bachman Now" that packing the court "was a bad idea, 80+ years ago when FDR came at it. And believe me, I didn't know FDR, but Joe Biden is no FDR."
He added, "FDR was coming off this colossal win, just tremendous victory, and the polls, and reelected president, right, and he couldn't get to first base. His own party said, ‘Mr. President, with all due respect, it's a bad idea.’ It was a profoundly bad idea then because he was very results-oriented. That's all he cared about."
Starr said that the "People who are pushing this just care about results. The court, whether you agree with a particular decision it’s operating efficiently, effectively, with a very high degree of professionalism, there's nothing that's broke.
He added later that associate justice Amy Coney Barrett could "be on the court until 2048," or later, "so this is their nightmare of very brilliant young judges at every level, including now at the Supreme Court of the United States with the three appointees of [former] President [Donald] Trump means that they don't have control, right.
"This is all about power. Who is in control? So they won ever so narrowly the United States Senate, which was the great great hope that we would have some balance in the national government. They don't have that, but they're very greedy for power. This is as simple as that, it's all about power, trying to get control of it and guess what, they have an independent judiciary. That's article three of the Constitution and they can't change that by this commission."
Starr went on to say, "This is a mischievous idea, and we shouldn’t just be so cavalier in saying it can’t happen. It could happen, so we've got to be prepared with very strong arguments, including the argument of history ... that this just should not go forward."
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Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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