This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.  It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On Thursday, House Judiciary Committee Republicans held a hearing to discuss, as they put it in the hearing’s official title, “a threat to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy.” The threat to which they referred, though, was not the Court’s myriad ethical scandals, or its efforts to gut both the Voting Rights Act and the Fifteenth Amendment, or its 200-plus-year track record of concentrating power in the hands of well-connected white guys named John. 

Instead, the threat that had House Republicans all riled up is the idea of increasing the number of justices on the Court. On its website, the Judiciary Committee promised during the hearing to “examine the history and perils of court packing,” as well as “other policy proposals that threaten to undermine the integrity of the judicial branch.”

Throughout the morning, Republicans framed their resistance to Court expansion as a defense of the institution’s legitimacy. The GOP’s first witness, Missouri Solicitor General Louis Capozzi, claimed that expansion would undermine the Court’s “insulation from partisan politics,” which enables it to make decisions based on “what the law requires, and not the fleeting goals of political actors.” The second witness, Cumberland School of Law professor William Ross, claimed that expansion would let the elected branches “manipulate........

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