Van Jones Calls Court Packing a ‘Teddy Bear’ for ‘Angry’ Democrats: Biden ‘Doesn’t Want to Take the Teddy Bear Away’
The notion of “court packing” has become a “teddy bear” for Democrats who feel government is stacked against them, CNN contributor Van Jones said Thursday evening.
“I keep getting accused of it being a distraction question, and I’m doing … work for the GOP for them, only in this bizarro world,” CNN host Chris Cuomo said as part of a discussion with Van Jones and CNN contributor Rick Santorum, speaking in reference to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s refusal to say whether he supports expanding the Supreme Court.
“I don’t get the reasoning behind not answering the question,” Cuomo said. “All he has to say is, ‘No,’ or, ‘You know what, I’m going to hold it over [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell’s head.”
Van Jones — who previously served as a special adviser to President Barack Obama — said Democrats were “angry” and that Biden didn’t want to take their “teddy bear” away, but that the issue was hurting his brand.
“Yeah, D-minus on that answer. There’s just no way around it,” Van Jones replied. “And now he’s put himself in this odd position where he says he’s going to wait until some other date. I guess what he’s saying is that he’s holding out some hope that they won’t nominate this new justice if he continues to play this game. It doesn’t make any sense. None of it makes any sense. And so I think the reality is the Democrats are very angry and upset, because at every level of the government right now it feels like the deck is stacked against us.”
“We’ve got two Supreme Court Justice seats that we don’t feel were given to the Republicans fairly,” he added. “You feel like the Electoral College stacks the deck against Democrats. You feel like the Senate’s got the filibuster. All these different things. The gerrymandering. So there’s so much pent-up frustration that Democrats are feeling that this issue of being able to pack the court has become a teddy bear for a lot of Democrats to hug on to at night and he doesn’t want to take the teddy bear away. But I think he’s hurting his own brand by not doing it. I think it’s better for him to come forward and say, ‘That’s not my brand of politics, I’m not going to do it,’ or, to your point, say he’s going to use it as a bargaining chip. But right now I think he’s hurting his brand.”
Biden said at an ABC News town hall in Philadelphia earlier in the evening that he would answer whether he supports packing the court prior to the election, but after the Senate has finished hearings for President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
Watch above via CNN.
