Republicans Need To Protect Integrity of the Supreme Court | Opinion

At almost every level of government, politicians desire to make every entity strictly partisan and biased in their favor. Whether it be through appointments to bureaucratic departments, the backing of elected officials to prevent others from winning campaigns, or simply using resources to affect policy or decision-making at the municipal, local, national, or state level, politicians often want nothing more than what can score points for their "team." Our Founding Fathers were aware, even 200 years ago, that this was the case when they developed the Supreme Court. They intended the Court to be separate from electoral politics, and based its integrity on being inherently non-political.

Over the last decade, however, more calls have been made to interfere with the Court. Whether it is Representative Ro Khanna's (D-Calif.) legislation to enact term limits for Justices or Representative Jerry Nadler's (D-N.Y.) bill to expand the Court from 9 to 13, the progressive Left has been making repeated attempts to assume control of the judicial branch.

These pieces of legislation are about nothing besides pure power. Rep. Khanna did not want term limits when the Court was leaning leftward, and Rep. Nadler did not want to expand the Court before conservatives had majority control. It is only when those they disagree with are making impactful judicial decisions that progressives start demanding a significant change to how the Supreme Court works.

Now that the Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives, they need to support Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) and Senator Ted Cruz's (R-Tex.) proposal to add an amendment to the United States Constitution that would cap the Supreme Court's number of Justices at nine. The amendment would ensure that no president could pack the Court—that is, expand it based upon political bias—to ensure their party or ideology all of a sudden has overwhelming power over the branch of our federal government that is supposed to check and balance the power of Congress and the president.

Now more than ever, the American public needs examples of political interference in their institutions being cut down to size, instead of the consistent breaches of public trust the government continues to commit. The current presidential administration is clearly willing to lock down people in their homes, force vaccinations, vastly expand the number of IRS agents to ensure compliance, and raid private citizens' homes for actions the president himself also committed. The very fact that there are members of our legislative branch willing to hand an overreaching power to this president should tell the public all it needs to know about the mentality of the Left. The Left cares about expanding the government's power by whatever means necessary and will do anything to ensure it can retain that power for decades.

Unless elected federal officials want the most powerful branch of the U.S. government to become ever-expanding without limit solely because of political favoritism, they should support legislation that would protect the Supreme Court's integrity forever. After two years of some of the most authoritarian overreach by a presidential administration that many of us have seen, it would be unwise to politicize the one government branch with any sense of independence.

Kenny Cody is a conservative columnist and activist from Northeast Tennessee, who serves as Chairman for the Cocke County (TN) Republican Party & Southern Regional Director for the Republicans for National Renewal.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.