#Why voters need Joe Biden to answer the court-packing question

Voters “don’t deserve” to know if a President Joe Biden would pack the Supreme Court, the candidate told an interviewer on Saturday. Yes, they do, Joe: Americans deserve to know who they’re electing — and it shouldn’t be that hard to answer.

Biden, running mate Kamala Harris and their campaign insist the court-packing question is simply a “distraction” from the real issues — that is, the ones they want to talk about. “I’m not going to play his game,” is how Biden puts it.

Except it’s the “game” of the American people.

Court-packing means enlarging the high court from nine justices, as it’s been since 1869, to as many as 15 — and filling the new seats with left-leaning judges, flipping the court from a restrained, conservative slant to an activist, progressive one. It’s so radical that the Senate (and the public) rejected it even when President Franklin Roosevelt pushed it after the Supremes threw out much of his early New Deal as unconstitutional.

Moreover, doing it now would require killing the Senate’s filibuster rules entirely — opening the door to lots of other radical legislation, such as the Green New Deal.

Biden claims to be a moderate, so why can’t he rule out this madness? Why insist that he’ll only answer after Election Day?

Liberals are doing their best to explain away his refusal to commit. Joe would never do it, they claim — he just doesn’t want to turn off voters in the AOC-Bernie Sanders radical wing of the party before he gets their votes. Even if true, he’s turning off at least some moderate voters by leaving the question open, when it ought to be a slam-dunk.

More: If he can’t say no to the far left now, you have to wonder if he will as president. He’s done nothing but appease progressives since clinching the nomination, even letting Sanders write much of the party platform.

And Biden has a long, long history of going along as the left tramples on tradition and precedent to have its way with the courts. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he delayed the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork for months so that the left could put on an unprecedented national ad campaign to blacken Bork’s name.

A few years lafter that, Chairman Biden presided over the Anita Hill travesty — wherein activists forced Prof. Hill to go public with harassment charges against nominee Clarence Thomas that she’d only been willing to make privately — resulting in what Thomas rightly called “a high-tech lynching.”

After that, Sen. Biden went along  as Democrats in the George W. Bush years broke with all precedent and started filibustering judicial nominees to keep eminently qualified right-leaning judges off the bench. Then, as vice president, he went along as Democrats ended the filibuster for most court nominations — allowing them to give the courts a huge push to the left.

He’s spent decades moving left on all of this. Heck, Biden’s now claiming it’s (somehow, he can’t say how) “unconstitutional” for Republicans to hold a vote to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the court before Inauguration Day — when as recently as 2017 he said senators are constitutionally “required to give the nominee a hearing and a vote.”

Biden’s public persona is Mr. Get-Along Nice Guy — and he is, to other Democrats. But it’s no holds barred if any Republican gets in his way, especially when it comes to the decades-old progressive project of stacking the courts.

And the voters deserve to know it.