All during the last election, court-packing was the talk of the town in Democratic circles. Disguised under the label of “court reform,” progressives were pushing for a way to dump several more members onto the Supreme Court while the Democrats held the White House and clung to thin majorities in both chambers of Congress. Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris stayed silent on the issue, no doubt aware of public polling that showed stiff opposition to the idea among the public. But once Biden was safely in office, he appointed a commission to “study” the situation, raising hopes among the progressive wing of his party that they might just be able to pull this scheme off. As The Hill reports this week, however, that plan is starting to “fizzle” and the liberals in Congress are not happy about it.

An effort by progressives to expand the Supreme Court is starting to fizzle as a presidential commission tasked with reviewing the controversial proposal saps earlier momentum.

The stalled progress isn’t exactly unwelcome to Democratic leaders in Washington who are happy to avoid a fight over court expansion, which could end up being a political liability for moderate Democratic candidates in next year’s midterm elections.

Congressional Democrats would prefer to stay focused on President Biden’s infrastructure agenda and conserve their political capital for a potential Supreme Court confirmation fight if Justice Stephen Breyer announces his retirement this week.

The chief complaints coming from the “squad” and the rest of the far-left wing center on the composition and mandate of the commission itself. It’s not composed of enough liberal firebrands anxious to make this change. And even if it were, the commission has no mandate to suggest specific legislation to address the issue. All the group is going to wind up doing is publishing a study of the legal history of the court’s composition and not much beyond that. Some are suggesting that Biden only formed the commission to give the appearance of not ignoring calls to pack the court.

The underlying reality, of course, is that none of these Democrats have any interest in “reforming” the Supreme Court. The court is functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers designed it to operate and the same way it’s been doing business since the Civil War era. You can also rest assured that if the court were currently composed of a majority of justices appointed by Democratic presidents, you wouldn’t be hearing a peep out of the Democratic Party about any need to “reform” it. This is partisan nonsense that the entire country can easily see through.

So why would Joe Bidean and congressional Democratic leaders be dragging their feet on this? The biggest reason is that the proposition is far from a sure thing to push through Congress with its current makeup. Several of Biden’s other signature policy proposals are bogged down in the Senate and some of them are likely to ultimately fail. Do they really want to set themselves up for another high-profile failure? Chuck Schumer reportedly prefers to keep his powder dry and keep trying to hammer through the infrastructure bill(s) and possibly some sort of police reform.

There’s a far simpler way to rebrand the court in a more liberal manner. Keep winning elections until a sufficient number of conservative justices retire and can be replaced by a Democratic president and confirmed by a larger Dem majority in the Senate. But that’s a lot of work and would take time. So some of these players want to seize the power to do it immediately with a legislative sledgehammer. Of course, they are once again ignoring the reality that if they take that sort of power for themselves now, it will be inherited by their opponents the next time the majority changes hands.