Republicans have been “trying to change the size of courts at both the state and federal levels for years,” Huffington Post reported on Friday, October 9, 2020, adding, “Two of those attempts, in Arizona and Georgia, were successful. In both cases, the GOP controlled the legislature and the GOP governor had significant power to appoint the judges he wanted to the court.”
Huffington Posts says, “There have been at least 20 bills to [change] the size of supreme courts in 11 states over the past decade, according to a new study by Duke University law professor Marin K. Levy. The vast majority of them have been by Republicans …. Legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Iowa, South Carolina and Louisiana have all tried to add justices, while Montana, Oklahoma, Washington, Alabama and Pennsylvania have tried to remove some. Republicans drove the changes in all those states over the past decade,” except in Louisiana and Alabama.
The motive was to get a political advantage: “[E]lected officials pushed for changes to their state supreme court when doing so was in their political interest,” Levy wrote.
Read story here.
Photo below: Artist’s conception of future Supreme Court listening to oral arguments
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