McConnell rips 'fake news' media for misleading public on Biden's court-packing push

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., accused the press of failing to accurately cover President Biden's take on expanding the Supreme Court.

"I’ve never been one to complain about fake news. But I want to start with the total frustration on the coverage that most of you have engaged with in regard to the issue of expanding the Supreme Court," McConnell said at the weekly press conference.

He argued that the media have done a disservice by oftentimes failing to note in their reporting that liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed the court should stay at nine judges.

"And yet I read story after story after story that do not mention that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, two of the most important liberals in modern time, are opposed to court-packing," McConnell said.

"Nine seems to be a good number. It's been that way for a long time," Ginsburg said in a July 2019 interview. "I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court."

So, McConnell demanded of the press, "why don’t you include in these objective analyses of this issue that fact?"  

Biden recently signed an executive order that established his bipartisan 36-member commission to study potential reforms to the Supreme Court, including whether the court should expand beyond nine justices and whether to retain the lifetime appointment of justices. The panel will have 180 days from the first meeting to complete its report.