If the Democrats take the presidency and the Senate, none of this matters much. A Democratic administration will not let a conservative court mess with Democratic priorities. Lots of avenues, including adding justices, passing a law that no act of Congress can be overturned by the Court except by a seven vote majority, etc.
First of all, the second proposal is absurdly unconstitutional. If we were to try it, the SCOTUS would simply throw it out, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the vote on it be unanimous.
Second, yes, we could (and should) expand the Court – but let’s be clear about the process. To be able to do so, we need to first eliminate the filibuster. This needs to be done at the very beginning of the congressional term, when rules are set. It’s not something that we can just decide to change once a particularly egregious decision is handed down. If we don’t eliminate the filibuster first thing (and, at the moment, it seems there are enough Democratic senators opposed to it to make it unlikely) our next chance will be the January after the 2022 midterms. Not only can a packed SCOTUS do a hell of a lot of damage in that time, but it’s not even certain we’ll still have a majority in both chambers to expand the Court by then, considering that midterms almost always result in gains for the party out of power.
So, while some of the guy’s recommendations might be solid, we should go into this with zero illusions: if we don’t do everything we can to stop Barrett from getting on the Court, we have, at best, ONE shot to undo the damage, and even that is frankly a longshot. If we just defer on this one, odds are we’ll be facing an ideologically-driven, hard-right SCOTUS running roughshod on us for the next quarter-century or more.
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