Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) engaged in a seriously hypocritical case of projection this week when he dared accuse Democrats of trying to overturn elections even though he’s the one who actually voted to literally overturn the 2020 Election.
On Thursday, Democrats unveiled legislation that would expand the Supreme Court from nine seats to thirteen in response to the Republican court-packing scheme they’ve been maliciously executing over the last several years.
Of course, the Constitution gives Congress the power to expand and contract the court and there is plenty of precedent and reason supporting the move. The current nine seats corresponded to the number of appellate courts back in 1869. Now there are 13 appellate courts.
Hawley responded to the legislation by claiming that it’s “a deliberate attempt to fundamentally change a core institution of American government and to overturn ― effectively overturn the results of past elections, in the sense that they’re quite openly and deliberately trying to undo the results of President Trump’s election in 2016, in terms of his ability to appoint three justices and to dilute that.”
Frankly, Republicans stole two of those seats when they refused to confirm Merrick Garland to the court in 2016 by claiming that Supreme Court nominees can’t be confirmed in an election year so that disgraced former President Donald Trump could nominate Neil Gorsuch. Then they promptly and hypocritically reversed that decree last year by jamming through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett just weeks before Election Day after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As for the seat occupied by Brett Kavanaugh, Anthony Kennedy retired under suspicious circumstances so Trump could fill that seat as well.
Also, if Hawley wants to play the overturn card, one could even say that Republicans overturned the election of former President Barack Obama in 2012 by denying him the right to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created in 2016 by the death of Antonin Scalia.
And that’s not the only hypocrisy here. Hawley supported the insurrection at the Capitol and voted to overturn the 2020 Election results in a scheme to overthrow democracy and keep Trump in power. The Constitution does not give Congress the power to overturn an election, nor does it support insurrection as a response to one’s preferred candidate losing. That’s a huge difference between what Democrats are doing and what Hawley did.
There is precedent for Supreme Court reform. What Hawley did is seditious and he should be ashamed enough of his own behavior and hypocrisy to resign from office.
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