Today after Harry Reid (D-NV) was forced against his own judgment to finally tweak the filibuster rules so that this President would be allowed to fill long standing vacancies per his right as the President, Republicans started whining that Obama was stacking the courts.
Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) spokesperson was quick on the lie draw today, quipping, “I’m looking forward to President Rubio stacking the courts.” (Never mind that Rubio will never win the GOP nomination, let alone the White House now.)
Sen. McConnell spokesman: "I'm looking forward to President Rubio stacking the courts."
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— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) November 21, 2013
Court packing means to expand the size of the court in order to pack it with supporters. That is not what President Obama is doing. FDR tried this, and it was wrong when he did it and it would be wrong no matter who did it.
PolitiFact already rated this accusation a FALSE when Mitch McConnell and Mike Lee tried it in May of this year. They explain that the meaning of court stacking/packing is to expand the size of the court:
Most historians and legal scholars offer similar definitions of “court packing.”
Burt Solomon, author of FDR v. The Constitution: The Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy, called it an effort to “expand the size of the court” to stack it with supporters. Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, agreed, saying it “indicates a departure from the ordinary process.” (Roosevelt is the great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant relative of FDR.)
If anyone is departing from normal procedure, it’s Republicans who didn’t even have objections to the nominees they obstructed – instead, they were using the process meant for debate in order to keep government from functioning and to keep Obama from leaving an imprint on the courts.
Republicans need to put down their POTUS hate crack pipe and start dealing with reality. The media could assist them by recalling that Mitch McConnell and the entire GOP admitted in January of 2009 that their only agenda was to make Obama a one-term president. Since that didn’t work out as planned, Republicans have gone completely insane, shutting down the government in a fit of pique best suited to a two-year-old.
Now, when busted on their unprecedented power grabs from the minority, they fall back on yet another egregiously false lie. Of course, they won’t be held accountable for this, because the media is very busy sniffing out oh-my-god problems with the ACA website.
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