Florida Attorney General and Big Lie promoter Ashley Moody used Big Fear on Fox News to fight any expansion of the Supreme Court.
A scathing editorial in South Florida's Sun Sentinel called her efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election “an affront to democracy” that has “reduced one of Florida’s most prestigious public offices to a grubby little outpost of Mar-a-Lago.”
But on Friday, Moody postured as a defender of non-partisan democracy when she appeared on the Your World show. Host Neil Cavuto described her as “leading a charge” to oppose the expansion of the court. “I don’t care what political party you belong to, every American should be screaming right now,” Moody urged.
She claimed that Biden’s committee to examine expansion is “a significant step that we have seen in other nation states that leads to the demise and destruction of democracy.”
Rather than point out her anti-democratic record, Cavuto asked, “What can you do in the meantime?”
Moody said she’s “leading an effort to push for transparency on this advisory committee,” meaning she wants their proceedings held in public “so that we can examine what’s being proposed.” She called it “the most dangerous issue to America we’re facing right now.” Then she praised Cavuto “for paying attention to it.”
Still “forgetting” how she worked to overturn an election, Moody moved on to oppose term limits for the justices. (Coincidentally, there are currently 6 Republican-appointed justices and only 3 Democratically-appointed ones, even though Republicans have lost the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections).
“What sets our nation apart from others is a strict separation of powers,” Moody laughably said, “and that we have an independent judiciary with lifetime appointments. Let me tell you, the court is the last bastion for freedom and independence. When government oversteps its authority and breaches upon the liberty of its citizens, an independent court is there to stop that.”
In fact, the Supreme Court has changed in size seven times in our country’s history and the country survived.
You can watch Moody use a sudden love of democracy to keep the justices from representing its citizens, below, from the April 23, 2021 Your World.
The hypocrisy of the GOP is quite simply jaw-dropping: After four years of non-stop packing of the courts, they have the gall to accuse others of wanting to do the same. This is not projection, but rather total bad faith.
Republicans have been trying to pack the judiciary and particularly the Supreme Court ever since Nixon took office in 1969. They had long been accustomed to the courts upholding their wishes and had been bitterly disappointed in the Earl Warren SC and rulings like Brown v Board of Education. (Angry Right Wingers have long wanted to overturn that ruling, among many others, as they were fine with a discriminatory public school system. When that was blocked by Warren, the Right Wing began pulling their kids out of public school, with the wealthier ones going to expensive private schools and the working class ones just home schooling.)
In the days of Reagan, the GOP instituted a “litmus test” to make sure their appointees were not just Republican but dependably Right Wing. But even that test was not strict enough for the Far Right, so Republican justices like Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy were deemed to not be conservative enough, particularly after they failed to outlaw reproductive choice in the Casey decision in 1992. In the current era, the selection of judges and justices for the GOP has been farmed out to extreme Right Wing groups like Heritage Action and the Federalist Society. This way, conservatives know that only their true brethren will be getting these seats.
Angry Right Wingers would also like you to forget that in 2016, they deliberately refused to even hold a hearing for Merrick Garland after he was named by President Obama to fill the seat of the deceased Antonin Scalia. Not only that, but senators like Ted Cruz smugly declared on cable news that they would refuse to hold any hearings for ANY judge named by Hillary Clinton regardless of who they were. Cruz went so far as to remind everyone that there was no rule saying that the Supreme Court necessarily had to have 9 justices and could get along just fine with 8 or 7.
These same angry Right Wingers would like everyone to forget how they rammed Neil Gorsuch into Garland’s SC seat and then did an endzone dance on the Senate floor to celebrate. They’d like everyone to forget how prominent Right Wingers pushed Anthony Kennedy into retirement (partly by providing his son with a lucrative position) and then rammed unrepentant rapist and partisan idealogue Brett Kavanaugh into that seat moments before the midterm election day. And they definitely hope everyone forgets how they seized on the death of Justice Ginsburg to ram Amy Coney Barrett into that seat, again within moments of a major election, even though they had previously decried such an action.
Let’s also not forget how angry Right Wingers rammed through literally hundreds of unqualified partisan idealogues into our judiciary between 2017 and 2020, with Mitch McConnell prioritizing the ram-throughs over providing aid to tens of millions of Americans in the COVID pandemic. And let’s not forget that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett should never have been confirmed to hold any seat in the judiciary, let alone Supreme Court seats. All were extreme partisan picks who were intended to do exactly what they will now do over the next decade – namely, rip up the precedents of the Earl Warren Court and return us to a time when the American Judiciary comforted the powerful and afflicted the afflicted.
Angry Right Wingers have literally spent over five decades trying to game our political system to give themselves the hardline judiciary they wanted. And now that they may have to deal with everyone else pushing back on their behavior, they’re crying foul? This would be laughable if it wasn’t so brazen, and if the consequences weren’t so serious. The Right Wing has no moral or ethical or legal high ground here. If they had the slightest iota of self-awareness, they’d hang their heads in shame.