Idea of court packing gains traction among some Democrats; are there alternatives?

The Dems may or may not have abandoned this scheme, but this is what the ABA thinks about court packing and other alternatives. Alternatives to what? A Court that the majority rejects the concept of a living constitution?

Some Democrats are considering the idea of court packing—adding seats to the U.S. Supreme Court—as President Donald Trump moves quickly to fill the seat vacated with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The Constitution doesn’t specify how many judges should sit on the Supreme Court. Instead, the number is set by statute. If the Democrats gain control of the Senate after the election, they could make the change.
Like the Dems changed the Senate filibuster rule with regards to Senate confirmations. How did that turn out for them?

One plan, known as the “5-5-5” plan, would increase the size of the Supreme Court from nine to 15 justices. Five would be affiliated with the Democratic Party and five with the Republican Party. The remaining five would serve one-year terms and would be chosen from among circuit and possibly district judges by unanimous or supermajority vote by the 10 political justices. If the 10 justices can’t agree, the Supreme Court would lack a quorum and be unable to decide cases.

Law professors Daniel Epps of the Washington University in St. Louis and Ganesh Sitaraman of the Vanderbilt Law School wrote a Yale Law Journal article proposing the idea.
A law professor? Has she forgotten that Art. III gives federal judges and justices a life tenure (good behavior)? Or does she think the constitution is a living document which can change with a whim?

Many candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary previously told the Washington Post that they would be open to the idea of adding justices to the court. They include current Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, a U.S. senator from California.

But Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden told the Washington Post that he is opposed to the idea. He made the same point in an interview with Iowa Starting Line last year.


“I’m not prepared to go on and try to pack the court because we’ll live to rue that day,” he said. “We add three justices. Next time around, we lose control, they add three justices. We begin to lose any credibility the court has at all.”


Ginsburg herself was troubled by the idea.


“If anything would make the court look partisan,” she told NPR last year, “it would be that—one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’ ”
Are there alternatives? (I mean real Constitutional alternatives.)

Increasing the size of the court isn’t the only alternative. Epps and Sitaraman also propose a second “Supreme Court lottery” plan, which would appoint every judge on the federal courts of appeals as an associate Supreme Court justice. Cases would be heard by a panel of nine, randomly selected from among the judges. Each panel could not have more than five judges nominated by a president of a single political party.
Law professors Samuel Moyn of the Yale Law School and Ryan Doerfler of the University of Chicago Law School outline other alternatives in a paper written in July and that will be published in the California Law Review.
I guess not. Without a Constitutional amendment this alternative is dead in the water.