Courts

Pete Buttigieg Is The Only Democrat Making Sense About The Supreme Court Right Now

The Mayor of South Bend must be part of the Supreme Court reform conversation.

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Pete Buttigieg (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Pete Buttigieg’s last name is pronounced BOOT-edge-edge. Got it? BOOT-edge-edge.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Because unlike some other white men people like to talk about, Buttigieg has actually announced he’s running for president, and he’s got a platform that should be appealing to anybody who knows that the future of the Supreme Court is on the ballot this election, as it is every election.

Nearly every Democratic contender descended on Austin, Texas, for SXSW. Buttigieg did a CNN Town Hall that you probably didn’t watch. If you have watched everybody else’s CNN Town Halls, you’ll note that the Supreme Court doesn’t come up very much. At Buttigieg’s, it did in a deeply personal way: “The most important thing in my life, my marriage, to my husband whose here… That intimate thing in our lives exists by the grace of a single vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.”

He then spun that answer off into a larger issue about LGBT rights. From CNN:

Buttigieg, who came out as gay during his 2015 re-election campaign, said he entered politics “in Mike Pence’s Indiana” at a time that “you could either be out, or you could be in office, but you couldn’t do both.”

He called for a federal equality law to extend non-discrimination protections to LGBT people and said, “We’ve got to end the war on transgender Americans.”

“Let’s be under no illusion: There are attacks on transgender Americans from the Oval Office. Picking on troops, people willing to lay down their lives for this country, not to mention teenagers in high schools,” Buttigieg said.

If other presidential candidates can connect as personally to the unbelievable power the Supreme Court holds in this country, they sure don’t talk like it.

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Buttigieg’s commitment to halt the conservative theocracy pushed by the Republican Party and the Federalist Society goes a lot further than personal anecdotes. Last week, in New Hampshire, Buttigieg went all-in on Court packing and Court reform:

Buttigieg also said there should be an examination of changing the structure of the U.S. Supreme Court.

He said that while the “exact right model” may yet be unclear, “I think the debate must begin.”

“It’s not a debate on how to make the court more progressive. Obviously, I’d like to see a court that is in line with my values. So would everybody else,” he said.

“The question to me is how do we arrest the decline in the perception of the court toward being viewed as a nakedly political institution.”

One idea that should be at least reviewed, he said, is increasing the number of justices from nine to 15 and perhaps rotating justices to the high court from the appellate level.

He said he finds “most intriguing” a structure in which five justices are appointed by Democratic presidents, five are appointed by Republican presidents, and then those 10 justices must unanimously agree on appointing the five additional justices, who would come from the appellate bench.

He said the idea was put forward by the Yale Law Journal.

“It takes the politics out of it a little bit, because we can’t go on like this where every time there’s a vacancy, there’s these games being played and then an apocalyptic ideological battle over who the appointee is going to be,” Buttigieg said.

“If we want to save that institution, I think we better be ready to tune it up as well.”

This is how Democrats should be talking about the Supreme Court, and none of them are. NONE of them are saying anything more about the Supreme Court other than some platitudes about which justices they’ll appoint. None of them have addressed the fact that the Republicans STOLE a seat on the Supreme Court last time, and none of them seem to have any plan for what to do about it.

Pete Buttigieg is talking about it, and he’s willing to consider actual plans to fix it. If Democrats could get their heads out of their asses about personality and name recognition, actually talking about how we’re going to FIX the courts should be at the top of any list of serious policy concerns.

Brian Fallon, director of Demand Justice, made a salient point about Buttigieg’s campaign on Twitter:

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The reforms only Buttigieg is talking about need to be part of the Democratic discussion for 2020. This man here gets it. If you care about the Supreme Court, you better learn to pronounce his name.

CNN hosts 2020 town hall at SXSW [CNN]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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