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

Over the past several years, whenever Democratic politicians have floated the possibility of expanding the U.S. Supreme Court, Republicans have reacted with a mix of indignation and fury, casting expansion as an unconscionable attack on judicial independence. 

Last year, for example, Texas Senator Ted Cruz called Court expansion “a direct assault on the design of our Constitution,” and accused Democrats of seeking to “advance policy goals they can’t accomplish electorally.” Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley said that expansion “would erase the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and destroy historic precedent.” Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith said that “packing the Court for political leverage destabilizes the integrity of the institution and is dangerous for our country.” All three are now co-sponsors of a constitutional amendment to prevent Congress from changing the size of the Supreme Court. 

But in the deep-red states of Wyoming and Utah, Republican lawmakers are openly embracing this supposedly taboo tactic, trying to change the size of their state supreme courts in order to secure rulings they prefer.  These efforts mirror an earlier, successful campaign in Arizona under former Republican Governor Doug Ducey, in which conservatives reshaped the state’s judiciary—and its jurisprudence—simply by changing the personnel on the court. 

On the national stage, Republican lawmakers treat Court expansion as a fringe idea tantamount to cheating. In Republican-controlled states, that same maneuver is becoming routine, stripped of the Ted Cruz-style moral outrage that accompanies it in........

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