Maxwell School News and Commentary

"The Republican base has been more focused on that issue [Supreme Court] than the Democratic base has from Reagan forward, roughly," says Thomas Keck, professor of political science and Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics. "There’s some evidence that that’s shifting."

"Impeachment of a U.S. president is an unusual circumstance," says Tom Keck, Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics. "(The chief justice) is there to oversee a trial, which is something that should be well within his comfort zone. But it's a trial conducted by elected partisan officials. It's not a court, the U.S. Senate." 

Tom Keck, Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics, says drastic measures might be needed such as term limits for new justices and keeping open the possibility of expanding the [Supreme] court’s size. "It may be our least-bad option in restoring the court’s role as a democratic guardrail."

"Regarding [Elizabeth] Warren’s use of [Frances] Perkins in her speech tonight: I just want to note that this [Perkins' opposition to the Brown v. Board of Education verdict] is something Perkins said near the end of her life, was buried in an extremely long academic oral history interview, and isn’t really public knowledge," says Steven White, assistant professor of political science.

"The size of the court is not specified in the constitution and it's changed multiple times…in the first 100 years it was a regular occurrence for Congress to change the size of the Supreme Court," says Thomas Keck, professor of political science and Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics.