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Mrs. FISCHER. Mr. President, 8 months after President Biden asked them to study Supreme Court reform, the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States has finally released its report.

I want to begin my comments by recalling the backstory behind this group.

The President created this Commission to appease some Members of the Democratic Party. These progressives want to pack the Supreme Court with Justices who will put their agenda before the Constitution.

Not all Democrats belong to that group. I see the Court packers as more of a radical fringe who can't stand the thought that the Court may make decisions that they don't like.

But instead of lending this fringe element the legitimacy they hoped for, the Commission's nearly 300-page report simply lays out the arguments for and against Court packing, and then makes no recommendation.

In fact, the lawyers, professors, and former judges the President appointed were deeply divided on the issue of adding more Justices to our Nation's highest Court.

Twenty-nine of the Commission's 34 members were liberals. But even with this supermajority of left-leaning scholars, the Commissioners still expressed their ``profound disagreement over whether Court expansion at this moment in time would be wise.''

If you can believe it, many Democrats in Congress are fond of saying that expanding the Supreme Court for political reasons is actually unpacking it.

Representative Jerry Nadler, the Democrat from New York who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has claimed that unpacking the Court by expanding it would ``restore balance'' and that Senate Democrats ``should immediately move to expand the Supreme Court.''

I want to be as clear as I can about this. Adding Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States simply because you don't like some of the decisions they make--that is Court packing.

President Franklin Roosevelt explored this idea in the 1930s, after the Supreme Court struck down key parts of the New Deal.

President Biden's Commission's own report called FDR's attempt to pack the Court a ``needless, futile, and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle.''

No President has been reckless enough or shortsighted enough to push for it since FDR. President Biden said he was not a fan of Court packing during his campaign, but then he backtracked and said he was open to the idea.

Giving in to pressure from the far-left wing of his party, he created this Commission instead, leaving the problem of taking a position on this issue for another more politically convenient day.

As the Commission's report details, Court packing is often used as a political weapon in authoritarian regimes, not in the United States of America.

Take Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez cemented support for his socialist policies by expanding the country's Supreme Tribunal of Justice from 20 members to 32 members back in 2004. Look at all the good that did for what was once the wealthiest country in South America.

We need to leave this practice to dictatorships, where it belongs. Republics, like the United States, simply don't engage in this kind of behavior.

As the Commission's report says, stable democracies ``have retained a strong commitment to judicial independence.'' Packing the Supreme Court would take an ax to that tradition of judicial independence.

The United States is the greatest country on Earth because of our respect for the rule of law, not in spite of it.

And in light of this report, a resolution I cosponsored earlier this year that would fix the number of Supreme Court Justices at nine is even more important, and I would like to thank Florida's senior Senator for leading the way on this.

In the American system of separation of powers and checks and balances, our role here in Congress is to make laws, not to interpret them. That is the job of our courts, and their independence in doing that job is absolutely vital.

As the Commissioners write in their report courts ``cannot serve as effective checks on government officials if their personnel can be altered by those same government officials.'' That is a bipartisan group writing that--a bipartisan group where liberals outnumbered conservatives nearly 6 to 1.

We cannot pack the Supreme Court. President Biden needs to put an end to this dangerous idea once and for all.

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