We Need To Talk About Court Expansion

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Strict Scrutiny is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It's back to school season, and this year, five million children across Texas are going to be greeted by the Ten Commandments in their classrooms. Yes, you heard that right. Texas politicians passed a law requiring the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom, forcing their religion on every kid in those schools. 28 families in Texas, supported by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, are taking the fight to the Supreme Court. And they need you to amplify their voices, before the Supreme Court gets its hands on this case. And we all know what the Fifth Circuit did. Obviously, they let Texas get away with all of this.
They're going to go up, but we're going to fight to get them taken down.
That's Texas public school parent Ted Lowe. Ted and Rebecca Lowe are an interfaith couple. Ted is Jewish and Rebecca is Christian. And their kids are in Texas public schools. The story they tell in this video is moving, and we hope everyone hears and shares it. Look, there is a human cost of Christian nationalist policies like these 10 Commandments laws and the decisions of Supreme Court hands down. Every child deserves access to public education where they aren't subject to state imposed religion or religious instruction or coercion. Public education is supposed to be open and available to everyone. It's supposed to foster pluralism, not one specific religion.
Visit au.org/10c to learn more about this case and how you can help join the fight to protect Church-State separation. We talked a little bit about this case on our regular episode last week, but there's so much more to be said and to learn about the people who are fighting back.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:42)
Mr. Chief Justice, may I please report? It's an old joke, but when an argument against two beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:54)
She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, I ask no favor for my sex.
All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet, off our necks.

**Kate Shaw** (2:25)
Hello and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. I'm Kate Shaw, your lone host for this episode of our special bonus series, which we're calling Hot Supreme Court Reform September. And for this installment of our series, I am delighted to be joined by a friend of the show, Jamelle Bouie, columnist for the New York Times, and probably the person whose columns appear more frequently than anything else in our recurring favorite things segment at the end of every show.
It's like we really shout out your columns so much, Jamelle. It's ridiculous. That's so nice. We really do. Thank you. And welcome to Strict Scrutiny.

**Jamelle Bouie** (2:59)
It's a pleasure to be here.

**Kate Shaw** (3:00)
As I just mentioned, we are doing a series about Supreme Court Reform.
And our goal in doing that is to try to shift a little bit from general criticism of the court and its decisions. And listeners to this podcast know that that is not in short supply on this platform, but to try to move a little bit or to include some conversations with leading thinkers about specific potential reforms to the Supreme Court. And today, I want to just ask you about one of the biggest and most controversial potential reforms to the court. And that is court expansion. Maybe we can call it court packing. Maybe we will talk about terminology. But before we get to that, I want to just stay on the court more generally for a minute. And I do think that people and maybe a growing number of people understand that something is deeply wrong with this Supreme Court. There was a Gallup poll in late July that had Supreme Court approval at 33 percent. Other polls have it in the mid or sometimes high 30s, but all at or near historic lows. And while I do think Scotus polling is quite imperfect, the change over time is still quite striking. So, Jamelle, I'm curious if you have any theories or thoughts on why the court is polling so badly right now.

**Jamelle Bouie** (4:10)
I think the two immediate things are first that people who identify as Democrats, people who identify as liberals have gotten very down on the court for reasons I think all listeners know. One interesting wrinkle here is that there are many Republican leading voters who don't think the court has been favorable enough to Donald Trump, and so that kind of structures their view. It's also the case that on the right, the political right, which is kind of almost a tradition of court hating that stretches back half a century. It's part of the language of the political right in a way that it isn't quite yet of the political left. I think that also shapes how Republican leading voters and conservatives think about the court. Obviously I think that the conservative complaint here is absurd.