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DNC Vice Chair Keith Ellison: Trump's use of Twitter might enable him to 'pack courts'



Most of the attention to this concerns the comparison to King George, which I guess seems more audacious for the purpose of attention-grabbing. Trump is King George. Trump is Napoleon. Trump is Julius Caesar. Yeah yeah . . . Trump is whatever historical figure you want him to be, as long as it's someone bad. That's pretty pedestrian stuff. But the real news here is that the vice chair of the Democratic Party apparently believes the president has the power to appoint federal judges - and as many of them as he likes - via Twitter:
"I see it in general as a good thing to foster communication from the government, but I think it can be used in a very bad way because what he's doing through his Twitter account and in other ways is circumventing the whole system to intimidate people, to pack courts, to intimidate the press, all so that he can just run everything himself," Ellison said. Ellison, the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, went on to say that the United States fought a war of independence against King George III of Great Britain in the 18th century. "We fought a war of independence against somebody, King George, who was trying to do that. This is really why I'm actually kind of concerned about his use of social media, not the fact that he uses it," Ellison said.
If you're trying to figure out how Trump's use of Twitter enables him to "pack courts," I'm right there with you.

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According to Keith Ellison's understanding of the Constitution, he could have avoided all the nonsense and simply tweeted judicial appointments

There was a president who tried to pack the court for real. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he became increasingly frustrated with a Supreme Court that kept declaring his limitless expansion of the federal government unconstitutional. In a fit of pique, FDR proposed a constitutional amendment that would have permitted a sitting president to appoint one new Justice for every sitting Justice older than 70. Had it been ratified while he was president, he would have been able to instantly expand the size of the Supreme Court to 15 - and of course all the new Justices would have been liberals who would have rubber-stamped FDR's New Deal programs. You think the federal government is big now, just imagine. That proposal went nowhere, but it does serve as evidence that court-packing has precedent in the minds of power-hungry presidents. Too bad for FDR he didn't have a Twitter account! According to Keith Ellison's understanding of the Constitution, he could have avoided all the nonsense and simply tweeted judicial appointments. Today we might have 100 Supreme Court Justices, all of them dutifully towing the Democrat line, with Congress helpless to do anything about it.

Keith Ellison may or may not be dumb as a box of rocks

This is one of those "if Sarah Palin or Dan Quayle had said this" type stories. Let a Republican who's been deemed ditzy by the media make a comment like this, and stand back while the Internet erupts with mockery. A Saturday Night Live sketch is a virtual certainty, along with an "explainer" from the earnest young liberals at Vox about how, no, you can't really appoint judges via Twitter. Keith Ellison may or may not be dumb as a box of rocks, but he's clearly given to making pronouncements that don't make the slightest bit of sense. I just thought you should know about that. The Republican Party clearly can't govern, but with a guy like this among the top leadership of the Democratic Party, maybe Republican election victories are still possible. In the meantime, why isn't President Trump tweeting a couple more conservative SCOTUS appointments? These days we need all the help we can get.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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