Republican Senate Conference Chairman John Barrasso (R-WY) chimed in on the battle over filling Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat. The senator essentially affirmed that the Democrats’ threats to pack the court are meaningless at this point. 

In an appearance on Fox News, Barrasso stated that he supports nominating and confirming a new justice to fill Ginsburg’s seat immediately. He argued that if the Democrats win control of the Senate, they will “change the rules” to work in their favor. “If the Democrats win the White House and the Senate and have the House, they will change the rules, they will blow up the Senate, they have an entire war room working on this,” he insisted. 

Barrasso continued, noting that the Democrats are attempting a “power grab” to gain electoral advantages. “They will expand the number of members of the Supreme Court, regardless of what the Republicans and President Trump do. … This is a pure power grab and then they want to stack the Senate as well by expanding the number of states to include DC statehood, with two new Democrat senators,” he explained.

Democrats who are pushing for adding more seats to the Supreme Court are in direct contradiction with Ginsburg, who stated that such a move would be overly political. “Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” she said in an interview with NPR. “I have heard that there are some people on the Democratic side who would like to increase the number of judges. I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.”

She continued, explaining that expanding the court would come off as a “partisan” move.“If anything would make the court look partisan,” she said. “It would be that—one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’”

Democrats and their allies in the corporate press are hammering the GOP for moving forward with the nomination and confirmation process. They claim that the Republicans are guilty of hypocrisy due to their refusal to consider Judge Merrick Garland, who was nominated by President Obama in 2016. 

In addition to packing the courts if they don’t get their way, Democrats are also threatening to impeach Trump and Attorney General William Barr to stall the confirmation. Both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) indicated that impeachment is on the table. 

Nevertheless, the Republicans seem to be in line with Barrasso’s way of thinking. The fact that the Democrats will likely attempt to pack the courts regardless of what the president does renders their threats impotent. All indications suggest that whether they like it or not, the Supreme Court will have a new justice before the election. 

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