Democratic nominee Joe Biden opened the door to expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court, depending on how the rest of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation process is handled.
‘I have not been a fan of court-packing because it generates, whoever wins it just keeps moving in a way that is inconsistent with what is going to be manageable,’ Biden said Thursday night at an ABC News townhall.
But with prodding from George Stephanopoulos, Biden said it would be something he’d consider though it ‘depends on how this turns out,’ telling the ABC News anchor he would announce a clear position by the November 3 presidential election.
Biden has been getting hit by Trump-aligned Republicans for refusing to say if he’d support a liberal-pushed idea to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court, to offset conservative gains from the Trump years.
Biden has been wishy-washy about giving an answer, telling Stephanopoulos he wasn’t answering the question purposely because he thought it served as a distraction.
‘You know if I had answered the question directly then all the focus would be on, ‘What’s Biden going to do if he wins?” Instead of on, “Is it appropriate what is going on now”‘ Biden said. ‘This is the thing the president loves to do, always take our eye off the ball.’
Asked whether voters had a right to know his position on the matter, Biden said that he would make his stance clear before Election Day.
“They do have a right to know where I stand, and they’ll have a right to know where I stand before they vote.”
Biden said he’s missed most of the Barrett hearings that took place in the Senate Judiciary Committee starting Monday.
‘My reading online what the judge said was that she didn’t answer very many questions at all and I don’t think she laid out much of a judicial philosophy,’ Biden said.
Biden had also specifically been asked about LGBT rights and answered, ‘I think there’s great reason to be concerned.’
Biden said he believed it was ‘inconsistent’ with the Constitution to push Barrett through ‘once an election begins’ because the only role voters have in picking Supreme Court justices is voting for president and for senators.
Biden said he’d have to see ‘if there’s actually real live debate on the floor’ before he would come to a decision about court packing.
‘It depends on how much they rush this,’ Biden said, apparently believing that the majority of GOP senators would consider shelving Barrett’s confirmation.
At another moment in the town hall, Biden acknowledged that his past support for a decades-old crime bill that included mandatory minimums for drug offenses was a “mistake.”
He defended other aspects of criminal justice legislation that he supported during his time in the Senate, however, and said certain elements weren’t executed properly by the states.
“The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally,” Biden said. “What we did federally — you remember George, it was all about the same time for the same crime.”
At times, the former vice president found himself walking a fine line between his own platform and the politics of the voters he needs to win over if he hopes to capture the White House in November.
Asked at one point about whether he would move to ban fracking, an important issue in Pennsylvania, he reiterated that he would not.
But he also said that he would “stop giving tax breaks and subsidizing oil,” and planned to invest heavily in renewable energy.
“What I would do is I would stop giving tax breaks and subsidizing oil,” he said. “We don’t need to subsidize oil any longer. We should stop that and save billions of dollars over time.”
Biden’s town hall was a far cry from that of President Trump, which aired live from Miami at the same time tonight.
That event was defined by a combative tone, frequent attacks on his political opponents and a refusal to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Recent polls, both nationally and in many critical battleground states, show the former vice president in the lead, and more Democratic voters than Republican voters have cast their ballots so far.