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.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.