The Democrats are working on a plan to assure themselves of court approval no matter how outlandish or how much it violates the US Constitution. They plan on approving hundreds of new federal judges and use them to flood the courts all across America. This is besides what they want to do to the Supreme Court.
Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn and Take Back the Court director Aaron Belkin sent a letter to Democratic leaders on packing federal courts.
There could be a fly in the ointment.
The Democrats could only pass it by packing the courts using reconciliation but the late Robert Byrd had passed what is known as the Byrd Rule that says you cannot add a lot of legislation added onto spending bills in order to piggyback it into law. The exceptions to the filibuster rule are spending and taxation which can pass the Senate by a simple majority.
The Byrd Rule gives the Senate Parliamentarian the right to decide what legislation can be added to a bill being passed under reconciliation. Otherwise, the Democrats would need 60 votes and there are not enough RINOs to give them enough votes to pass it since it neither affects spending or taxation.
They face another hurdle as well. Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema have not been toeing the far-left liberal line.
In order to pass anything, Democrats must get all fifty of its caucus members to vote for a bill with Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote. If a Democrat votes against a bill, they need a Republican to cross the aisle as well.
The 2022 midterm election could be very important because not only do vulnerable Democrats could lose but because so many RINOs are not running for reelection and they could be replaced by true conservatives.
Instead of eliminating the individual mandate outright, Senate Republicans changed the penalty for violation to zero. This change affected the federal government’s tax policy, thus satisfying the “merely incidental” standard, while still effectively ending the individual mandate.
Moyn and Belkin argued in their memo to Senate Democrats that adding 250 lower court judges satisfies the “merely incidental” standard because the proposal would cost an estimated $209 million to $382 million in mandatory government spending, based on data from the United States Courts’ congressional budget request for 2021.
It is unclear if current Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough would support the radical proposal. She notably struck down a $15 federal minimum wage proposal from the COVID-19 relief package last month under the Byrd rule.
