How the Left Lost Faith in SCOTUS and Learned to Love Packing the Court – By Pema Levy (Mother Jones) / Oct 14, 2022
Climate, abortion, LGBTQ, and gun control groups want to expand the court—before it is too late.
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On the spring day last year the Supreme Court announced it would hear a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, Sarah Lipton-Lubet knew immediately how the case would end: the court, stacked with six conservative Justices, would kill the right to abortion. A veteran reproductive rights advocate and lawyer who was consulting for multiple reproductive rights groups at the time, her realization was followed by another: She needed a new job. She’d spent the better part of two decades fighting for abortion access, relying on a backbone of judicial decisions that upheld reproductive rights—and on the premise of a Supreme Court that would uphold those precedents. But that wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
“Simply trying to move around the pieces on the playing field that existed was not going to treat this like the crisis that it was, the crisis that it is now.” Instead of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, she needed to plug the hole and right the ship. About two months later, she became executive director of Take Back the Court. This is an advocacy group that since 2018 has been leading the movement to add four justices to the Supreme Court and dethrone the conservative majority that now controls it. With the legal precedent central to her previous work now dead, Lipton-Lubet is fighting to change the make-up of the court before every other progressive priority goes the way of Roe. “I’ve never felt more hopeful about my work,” she says.
The movement to reform the Supreme Court is gaining momentum and credibility at a rapid pace in large part because of people like Lipton-Lubet—advocates for progressive causes who watched the ascension of Trump-appointed justices to ill-gotten seats on the bench and have now concluded that their life’s work can never be realized if the Supreme Court’s current conservative majority remains in power.
