How Americans can prevent a Court-packing disaster.

This month marks the 58th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the geopolitical showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union that brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. We are here today only because cooler heads prevailed in that conflict, leading to the Kennedy-Khrushchev Pact and the first real détente in the Cold War.

More than five decades later, it’s worth applying the lessons of that dangerous moment to an entirely different matter: the battle over the Supreme Court. Today, we are engaged in a judicial arms race that, if left unchecked, will lead to the destruction of our democracy. For the sake of the courts and the Constitution, we can only hope that cooler heads once again prevail.

In response to Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, some of our nation’s leaders have threatened the unthinkable: increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court for partisan purposes. This, they argue, is a necessary correction to the Court’s shifting ideological balance. But we should call it what it really is: a dramatic and irreversible escalation in the fight over the federal judiciary.

So-called Court-packing would be the equivalent of launching a nuclear warhead — an extreme course of action that would require a reciprocal response. That’s why, for the better part of a century, both the Left and the Right have roundly condemned the idea. It’s only this year that support for Court-packing has gone mainstream, with prominent members of the Democratic Party openly considering it.

This group includes two of my friends and former colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Chris Coons (D., Del.) and former vice president Joe Biden. As recently as 2017, Senator Coons pushed back against calls to increase the number of justices on the Court. But last week, both he and Biden expressed a newfound openness to the idea. Biden and I served alongside each other on the Senate Judiciary Committee as chairman and ranking member, respectively. While we had our political differences, we were always aligned in our opposition to Court-packing. When we served together, he called it “a bonehead idea.” I could not agree more.