Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) reportedly said Monday that adding additional seats to the Supreme Court, often referred to as “packing,” is “not the ultimate solution.”
{mosads}“My worry is that the next time the Republicans are in power they will do the same thing. I think that is not the ultimate solution,” Sanders said at an event in Washington, D.C., according to Reuters.
Sanders floated solutions he said would better address the issue of judicial appointees, including term limits for the justices, who currently serve lifetime terms, or a system under which justices rotated between the high court and appeals courts, the news service noted.
The idea of adding justices to the court has gained steam among some progressive activists as a method of tempering the effects of President Trump’s two appointees, who have given conservatives on the court a 5-4 majority.
Other Democratic presidential candidates, including South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, have signaled openness to expanding the high court. O’Rourke and Buttigieg have also both talked up a system in which Democrats and Republicans would name five appointees each to the court.
“This central objective [in] that is to prevent the Supreme Court from continuing on this trajectory to become basically ruined by being a nakedly political institution,” Buttigieg said in March.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who blocked then-President Obama from appointing Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016, has spoken out against court packing, calling it “a radical proposal that has been dead and buried by bipartisan consensus for almost a century” and accusing Democrats of embracing the idea to avoid the consequences of losing elections.