It’s time to increase the number of Supreme Court justices - The Washington Post

Discussion among Democrats about the Supreme Court now centers on the illegitimacy of the Court.  What is meant by that is that in a rough way victory in Presidential politics means that the ideological array on the high court lags behind but approximately reflects the election returns.  Of course life tenure and GOP focus on young ideologically vetted judges have skewed that.

Ian Ayres ad John Witt propose a temporary intervention to compensate for the stonewalling of the Merrick Garland nomination and the theft of that seat by Trump's first nominee Neil Gorsuch.  The problem is now aggravated by the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh whose hysterical partisan rant destroyed the myth of the neutral non-partisan magistrate. - gwc
It’s time to increase the number of Supreme Court justices - The Washington Post'
by Ian Ayres and John Witt (Yale Law School)

At crucial moments in U.S. politics, parties have acted to change the size of the Supreme Court. Often the tactic was a political power play. But sometimes it was undertaken for the good of the country, as during the Civil War, when the Republican Congress in 1863 added a seat to the court in part to protect the success of the war effort against formidable legal challenges.

The Democrats’ court-balancing proposal for 2020 should commit the party to expanding the size of the Supreme Court by appointing two new federal judges who, by statute, would be designated to sit on the court for 18 years; thereafter, the constitutionally required life tenure would be served in lower federal courts. If Democrats took control of Congress and the presidency in 2020, the new administration would effectively have two Supreme Court slots to fill immediately. The party should commit to nominate one liberal (say, the liberal analog of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch) and to fill the other spot by renominating the liberal-centrist Garland himself.