During Barack Obama’s second term, a variety of prominent Republicans became confused about what the term “court packing” means. Some GOP senators, including Iowa’s Chuck Grassley and Texas’ John Cornyn, said that if Senate Democrats confirmed judicial nominees to fill existing judicial vacancies, that necessarily meant the president and his allies were engaged in “court packing.”
The partisan whining was rather silly. Court packing has a simple definition: It involves expanding a bench by adding judicial seats for the purpose of moving a court in an ideological direction.
Indeed, despite the GOP’s apparent confusion about the meaning of the term, the party eagerly embraced court packing in Georgia in 2016, where it created a new conservative majority, and in Arizona the same year, adding two seats to the state Supreme Court.
The results were dramatic: After Republicans added a pair of far-right jurists to Arizona’s highest court, for example, it started issuing far-right rulings, not the least of which was its upholding of a Civil War-era abortion ban, which sparked a national controversy in 2024.
A decade after the efforts in Arizona and Georgia, GOP officials in another state are taking a page from the same playbook. The Associated Press reported:
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill Saturday that expands the state Supreme Court from five justices to seven as frustration has mounted among Republican lawmakers over a string of defeats before the tribunal.
Republican advocates for the change argued that it would help improve the court’s efficiency. But legal experts said it could have the opposite effect and set a dangerous precedent at a time of tension between the branches of government. The state’s judiciary did not ask for more justices on the high court.
There’s no great mystery here: Utah Republicans have grown increasingly frustrated as the state Supreme Court has thwarted their ambitions on issues such as reproductive right and school vouchers. But partisan ire reached a new level last year when the state’s high court also crushed the GOP’s redistricting efforts, leading to a new map that will make it possible for Democrats to win a seat.
Partisan efforts to expand the Utah Supreme Court soon followed, and the incumbent GOP governor is now positioned to have appointed five of the state’s seven justices, thereby increasing the odds that rulings in the near future will be more in line with Republicans’ wishes.
In progressive politics, it’s not uncommon to hear advocates for expanding the U.S. Supreme Court in response to GOP abuses. The next time the right decries such reform proposals as indefensible “court packing,” keep these state-based developments in mind.
