From The Galactic Encyclopedia, 3020 edition under the entry titled: “United States Supreme Court: History.”
…reached perhaps the height of its erudition and competence, with the appointment and confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett (see portrait in Volume 4, next to “Dignity, concept”). This golden age, however, would be vanishingly brief, as the election of a Democratic president (whose name is now lost to us), was followed within forty-eight hours by his commitment to one of the early 21stcentury’s primitive asylums for victims of then-incurable age-related mental decline.
The ascension of President Kamala Harris followed. While best known today as the comically unscrupulous and hapless villainess of the musical comedy “Poontroon,” written half a century later, the real-life Harris was a far more ominous figure.
Musical comedy script notwithstanding, there is no evidence that Harris attempted to influence any Supreme Court decisions through clumsy attempts at physical seduction. It seems unlikely indeed, that at the age at which she assumed the presidency, she would have attempted the methods that marked her earlier political career.
Events related later in the show, however, including the “packing” of the Supreme Court, certainly occurred, though without the literal song-and-dance. Harris and her Democratic majority increased the court from nine to 15 justices shortly before the Interregnum.
Those justices who could still be located after the Restoration resumed their seats, and new justices were appointed bringing the total back to 15, but this did not settle the matter of court size. Changes in administration continued to bring about “court packing,” a process that at first was demanded by partisanship, then enshrined as tradition.
Within six administrations, the number of justices had risen to outnumber first the Senate, and within 10 years, the combined houses of Congress. The process of confirmation necessarily was streamlined. Lawyers (the court was then restricted by strong custom to holders of “law degrees”) began to maintain Partisan Credential Files (PCFs) so that their bona fides might be quickly established during their favored party’s majority periods.
Many ambitious lawyers maintained separate PCFs showing supposed commitment to both parties, for use in either situation, leading to much embarrassment in the case of accidental submission of the wrong file. It was one of these occasions which sparked the neo-populist demand for further expansion of the court to include every American citizen holding a law degree.
While this effectively eliminated partisanship, it resulted in startlingly (or, a cynic might say, predictably) incoherent and unjust decisions. Indeed, a number of lawyers submitted written opinions consisting of randomly generated nonsense. When challenged on the practice, their response was that anything other than nonsense would be an unconscionable break with court precedent, an argument which, by then, was difficult to assail.
This, then, was the background to the final court expansion effort, spearheaded by Senator Esmerelda Cruz Trump (known as “Trump The Umpteenth” for her connection to the longstanding politically prominent family).
Believing that moral issues, and the reading of the plain sense of the restored Constitution, should not be the realm of a legal elite, she suggested that every voting citizen be appointed to the court. This controversial step, though obstructed for months by the Neo-Communicrat Coalition, eventually was taken after the Communicrats were granted the right to generate and publish derisive slanders against all nominees (that is, every voting citizen).
This compromise was the root of the modern tradition in which, on his 18th birthday, an American citizen walks through a gauntlet of garishly-costumed celebrants shouting vulgar insults at him, until he picks up the ceremonial gavel and crushes the oddly named ceremonial “pelosi,” a ceramic female troll figurine bearing a quiver full of arrows (but never a bow). (The original significance of the “pelosi” is a matter of much speculation among scholars, and beyond the scope of this article.)