By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — University of Kansas law professor Lou Mulligan sees the proposal to add justices to the United States Supreme Court as legal, but not necessarily wise.
"The Constitution of the United States does not require a certain number of justices," said Mulligan. "It leaves it for Congress to decide. We've had as few as five, we've had as many as 10, but we've had nine justices on the Supreme Court since 1869."
If the size of the court can be changed by Congress, and it can be, there is a concern that changes in political power would prompt changes in numbers of justices over and over.
"The bigger threat to packing the court like this would be, it would never end," Mulligan said. "You would rob the judiciary of its independence and would just continually be putting a different President's people on the court each time he or she was elected President."
The function of the Supreme Court is important, but it's only really a small part of the federal court system.
"The Supreme Court of the United States is unusual in that it gets to pick its own cases," Mulligan said. "It doesn't pick the easy cases, because it's not a good use of its time. We have federal courts of appeal that sort of sit in the middle for just your regular appeals. Only the really hard ones, where the courts have disagreed with each other, the Supreme Court steps in. It's not unusual, given that those are really hard cases, that you would have the justices disagree sometimes and for those cases to be really highly charged cases."
President Biden said on the campaign trail that he wasn't interested in expansion of the Supreme Court, and also the filibuster is still in effect for legislation in the U.S. Senate, so there are still some hurdles before any change would be made.