Franklin Roosevelt ended up choosing to try to pack the Supreme Court. He failed, but in a way,

succeeded in pressuring the justices to take up a new position, which was basically that

democracy rules and the judiciary only gets involved when some disaster has taken place.

And I think we can look back and see that that settlement was in a sense disastrous in its own right in the long term because it's set up a dynamic where supposedly there was supposed to be judicial self-restraint.

And, you know, self-restrain is like, you know, when I try to go on a diet, it doesn't work.

We need institutional restraint where we don't make it up to the actors inside the system,

whether they abuse their powers.

So that's sort of the setting, I think, for the current situation, because the period

since Franklin Roosevelt, after a very brief moment of judicial passivity, has seen defection

on both sides, you know, for good and bad ends.

But, you know, you've had judicial activism, let's call it, of a liberal kind and of a

conservative kind. And now looming is, you know, a reactionary kind since there's going to be a lot

of right-wing votes on the court. So with all that in the background, I think the first, you know, task is not to repeat our mistakes

and just like preserve the idea that the Supreme Court is good and noble, an apolitical,

neutral space that speaks in the name of the people's constitution and then pressure it

into not abusing this power.

Instead, I think we ought to cut it down to size.