During a rally on Saturday, Vice President Mike Pence defended Judge Amy Coney Barrett prior to her confirmation hearings on Monday in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
According to Fox News, Pence reminded attendees at The Villages retirement community in Sumter County, Florida of when several Democratic Senators grilled Barrett for her Catholic faith during her Court of Appeals hearing back in 2017.
“The American people expect Democrats in the Senate to give Judge Barrett a dignified hearing, this time,” Pence said. “But we have reason to be concerned.”
The Vice President proceeded to bring up California Senator Diane Feinstein, who at the time told Barrett, “the dogma lives loudly in you.”
“Well, I’ve got news for the Democrats and their friends in Hollywood – the dogma lives loudly in me,” Pence said as the crowd cheered.
“The dogma lives loudly in you, and the right to live and work and worship according to dictates of our conscience, lives loudly in the Constitution of the United States of America,” he asserted.
Should Barrett be confirmed before the 2020 presidential election, several congressional Democrats threatened to pack the Supreme Court, which would expand the number of justices.
Pence criticized the move as “the biggest power grab in American history.”
Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden, however, accused the Republican Party for packing the court when asked by reporters as to whether or not he would do the same.
“The only court packing going on right now is going on with Republicans packing the court right now,” Biden said on Saturday, The Blaze reports.
“It’s not constitutional what they’re doing,” he added. “I’m going to stay focused on it so we don’t take our eyes off the ball here.”
On Friday, a Las Vegas reporter pressed on Biden’s court packing stance by asking him “don’t the voters deserve to know?”
“No, they don’t,” Biden said as he criticized President Trump for appointing judge Barrett prior to the election.
“I’m not gonna play his game, he’d love me to talk about [it], and I’ve already said something on court-packing, he’d love that to be the discussion instead of what he’s doing now,” the Democratic presidential nominee continued. “He’s about to make a pick in the middle of an election, first time it’s ever been done, first time in history it’s ever been done.”
During a 1983 Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden denounced President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court-packing proposal as a “bonehead idea.”
“Roosevelt clearly had the right to send to the United States Senate … a proposal to pack the court,” Biden said at the time. “It was totally within his right to do that. He violated no law, he was legalistically absolutely correct, but it was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make, and it put in question, for an entire decade, the independence of the most significant body: The Supreme Court of the United States of America.”
According to the Federal Judicial Center, FDR made the proposal to pack the court in 1937 after his New Deal legislation was rejected. The move, however, was unsuccessful as the former president was criticized for trying “to shape the ideological balance of the Court” in his favor.
Photo courtesy: (C)Getty Images/Pool/Pool
Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer. Visit his blog Blessed Are The Forgiven.
