CSPAN2 -- The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy held its 2019 convention in Washington, D.C. Senator Mazie Hirono, Democrat, Hawaii, delivered the keynote address. She criticized Republicans for packing the federal courts with nominees and judges who she said would hurt women’s reproductive rights and turn back progress of the Affordable Care Act. Following her remarks, a panel discussed and debated whether there needs to be changes to the judicial nomination process and the structure of the Supreme Court.
“The conservative recipe for power is for the forces of greed to incite paranoia, to drive voters to the polls to vote for greed,” said Aaron Belkin, professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University. “And what our polling shows is that conservative thought leaders have successfully spent a generation of whipping up their base on the basis of court decisions that they don’t like. So they’ve taught their own voters that the court can be very very bad, and they have go to the polls in order to pursue their values.”