JOSH BLACKMAN: Republicans Should Not Pack The Courts: It’s an impulse born of understandable frustrations with our judicial system, but it must be resisted. “Citing an increasingly large caseload, Professor Calabresi posits that the solution to an overworked judiciary is the appointment of new judges. On the district-court level — the trial level in the federal judiciary — there are currently 673 approved judgeships. On the circuit-court level — the intermediary level below the Supreme Court — there are currently 167 approved judgeships. Based on Calabresi’s calculations, optimally, there should be 185 new district judges and 262 new circuit judges, though, to his credit, he dials back these numbers significantly. In 1978, Congress enacted the Omnibus Judgeship Act of 1978. This Carter-era bill increased the number of district judges from 394 to 510, and the number of circuit judges from 97 to 132. Using this history as a baseline, Calabresi proposes the creation of 200 district judgeships and 61 circuit judgeships. If your eyes haven’t glazed over by this point, allow me to summarize the change in more understandable terms. In their eight-year terms, Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama were able to confirm 66, 62, and 55 judges to the courts of appeals, respectively. Under Calabresi’s proposal, in only four years, Trump could potentially confirm more than 100 appellate judges.”

The problem is that after Harry Reid rammed ObamaCare through on reconciliation and nuked the filibuster, the institutional traditions and trust that used to limit this sort of thing are gone. What would it take to bring them back? And no, I’m seriously asking that. What would it take?