Thread by @stevenmazie

The Biden commission on SCOTUS reform has released a long interim document in advance of its final report.

Here's its bottom line on proposals to expand the Court: a balanced Court is (1) overrated; and (2) may "reinforce the notion that the Justices are partisan actors."

Here are links to the full set of documents whitehouse.gov/pcscotus/publi…

Justice Breyer rn

(Justice Breyer's new mini-book, "The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics," argues that Court expansion is a very dangerous idea.)

More on the contents of that book, when he delivered it last spring as a lecture

https://twitter.com/stevenmazie/status/1379874200421273600?s=20

Note that I was extremely very completely dead wrong in April when I was quite sure the speech/book was seeded with hints Breyer was about to retire.

(I wasn't wrong about the ACA case, though.)

Clarification: those grafs close the section on “membership and size of the Court” and relate to expansion but speak directly to some other reforms to balance the Court ideologically.

Here's the closing thought on expansion per se: most, but not all, members of the commission fear expansion will set a dangerous precedent giving countries license to undermine their independent judiciaries.

And here is the argument against gradually expanding SCOTUS over time