Vice President Kamala Harris, who will likely be the Democratic presidential nominee following President Joe Biden’s departure from the race, has expressed a willingness to consider expanding the size of the U.S. Supreme Court in order to combat the institution’s right-wing tilt in recent years.
As a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries of 2020, Harris said that she would consider pursuing court expansion, noting that such a measure could combat Republicans’ takeover of the Court over the past decade. (Within that time frame, the GOP had blocked a Court appointment by former President Barack Obama in 2016, making the unprecedented argument that an election year warranted delaying a pick — only to later appoint a nominee by former President Donald Trump just days before the 2020 election.)
During a forum in New Hampshire in May of 2020, a moderator asked Harris how she felt about adding as many as four seats to the Supreme Court. The then-senator from California said she was “open to this conversation.”
Harris also signaled a desire to place restrictions on the amount of justices a president can appoint to the Court, and to end lifetime appointments for justices. These reforms and others would restore the Court’s legitimacy in the eyes of voters, she suggested.
Two months prior to that forum, Harris similarly indicated that she was willing to consider increasing the size of the Court.
“We are on the verge of a crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court … we have to take this challenge head on, and everything is on the table to do that,” she said.
Although Harris has said she’s “open” to expansion, it’s possible that she would reject such a proposal in the future — but her statements still represent the closest the idea has gotten to an endorsement from a presidential candidate in quite some time.
When Biden won the Democratic nomination in 2020, he vowed to create a commission to examine possible reforms to the Court but did not endorse any specific proposals. During her presidential debate with then-Vice President Mike Pence, Harris downplayed her previous views on court expansion, suggesting a possible disagreement with Biden that she didn’t want to display to the voting public.
Pence referenced Harris’s past statements and accused her of wanting to “pack” the courts. Harris then turned the question against him, noting that the lifetime judicial appointments that were made during Trump’s tenure didn’t include a single Black judge.
“You want to talk about packing the courts, let’s have that discussion,” Harris said.
Months after Biden and Harris entered the White House, Biden convened his promised commission of legal experts to examine potential reforms to the Supreme Court. The commission released a report in December of 2021 that included bipartisan support for tenure limits, with disagreement on the issue of court expansion. Biden has not acted on the report since, although rumors swelled last week that he would soon introduce potential reforms for Congress to consider.
Polling shows a slight majority of Americans support expanding the size of the Supreme Court. There is a strong case to be made that expanding the Supreme Court would increase its integrity and reverse the underhanded moves by the GOP that created a far right Court in the first place.
Expanding the Court “in a way that would bring balance to the Court’s current extreme, far-right majority would help ensure the Court better reflects the values of the American people,” says Demand Justice, a progressive organization that seeks to “restore the ideological balance and legitimacy of our federal courts.”
A multi-university study from last year also found that, without reforms to the Supreme Court — potentially including court expansion — the Court would remain in conservatives’ control, despite electoral outcomes, until at least 2065.
In 2021, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) also expressed support for court expansion, writing:
Adding seats to the Supreme Court may be one of the few ways to deescalate the arms race around the court. If we stand by while the highest court in our land bows to special interests and destroys the long-acknowledged rights of individuals, we reward those who broke the rules in the first place, encouraging bad actors to further corrupt the court without any consequences.
Notably, Republicans have only had four victories in the last nine presidential election cycles, two of which were without securing the popular vote. But despite winning a minority of those races, a majority of Court appointments during that time (seven out of 12 of them) have been appointed by GOP presidents.
Polling shows a declining rate of public confidence in the Supreme Court over the past few years that corresponds with justices’ right-wing rulings during that time. According to a recent Fox News poll, only 38 percent of Americans approve of the Court, while 60 percent express disapproval — the lowest approval rating since the network started asking that question.
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