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Posted on 05/18/2026 1:53:28 PM PDT by Red Badger
When leftists aren’t able to achieve their desired political, policy, and ideological outcomes, they often target any institution perceived to be standing in their way. Nothing is safe or sacred.
Their targets for “reform,” a preferred euphemism for burning down institutions and rigging the rules on behalf of power-driven ends, have included the Senate, the Electoral College, and the judiciary.
They drone on about defending “democracy” and resisting “authoritarianism,” but much of this posturing is pure projection. They vow to blow up the system to “save” it, but the goal isn’t preserving democracy or any other high-minded-sounding objective. It’s securing power and control, which they view as their birthright. Anything obstructing that power and control must be a flaw in our institutional structure, you see, so that structure must be eliminated or manipulated — sorry, “reformed” — until they get their way.
The truly radical project of court-packing is fast becoming a mainstream view, if not a litmus test, on the Left. Lawmakers with presidential ambitions are demanding “reforms” to the Supreme Court, with several openly calling for the addition of four seats.
Why four, you ask? Well, after decades of progressive supremacy, especially on social and cultural fronts, the court now features a 6-3 conservative-leaning and constitutionalist majority. This is the product of many years of hard work by the conservative legal community, forged through hard-fought election victories and bruising confirmation battles. Every step of the way, leftists have been the aggressors in these fights, but conservatives persevered and adapted — finally attaining a long-sought majority through legitimate means, within the rules. So-called progressives hate it. They feel entitled to their desired outcomes, so this court is a problem.
Adding four seats would theoretically allow Democrats to turn a legitimate 6-3 conservative majority into an illegitimate 7-6 progressive majority, overnight. Presto. “Progressives” will whine about the Antonin Scalia vacancy and alleged GOP hypocrisy on the Ruth Bader Ginsburg vacancy, but they can thank Democrats for both of those results.
This banana republic madness would destroy the court’s authority and would bring about a bona fide constitutional crisis. Its proponents don’t care. They want what they want, and they seem willing to do literally anything to get it. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) just posted a call for court-packing extremism. In addition to pushing Supreme Court term limits, which would likely require a Constitutional amendment, Khanna echoed a growing roster of other congressional leftists in insisting upon action to “expand the court from 9 to 13 Justices, now.”
Now? Is Khanna asking the current Republican majorities and President Donald Trump to implement a 10-3 conservative Supreme Court majority? Of course not. The “now” bit is just activist agitation language.
What he means, naturally, is that Democrats should expand the court if and when they attain the levers of power to implement such an extreme course of action. This version of the chant doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue:
What do we want?
Court-packing!
When do we want it?
As soon as we have a governing trifecta, but definitely not before!
“Now,” therefore, was just a filler word to mindlessly complete the chant. It was plainly not intended to be taken literally, which gives the whole game away. If it were a few back-benchers rattling this particular saber, that would be concerning, but not urgently alarming. The real red flag here is the endorsement of this extremism by “old guard,” Clintonite Democrats such as James Carville, and an apparent embrace of similar “reforms” by the party’s two most recent presidential nominees.
Former President Joe Biden announced his version of a proposal in the waning days of his relevance, just after he was forced out of the 2024 race — just prior to Democrats nullifying their entire primary election, as soon as their giant lie about their incumbent’s mental fitness imploded on a debate stage. The woman who replaced him in that race, and who lost the election, recently told allies that her party should consider court-packing.
“Look, this is a moment where there are no bad ideas, a ‘no-bad-idea brainstorm’ is what I’d like to call it,” former Vice President Kamala Harris said. “And in that no-bad-ideas brainstorm, we talk about what we need to do and think about doing around the Electoral College. We talk about the idea of Supreme Court reform, which includes expanding the Supreme Court.”
She also mentioned another popular leftist power-grab fantasy: “statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C.” What is significant about this tepid half-hug of adding Supreme Court seats and U.S. senators, which is the one and only purpose of the ‘statehood’ scheme, is that Harris is not a leader. She follows the blowing winds within her coalition, often belatedly. She is a lagging indicator. If it’s finally occurring to her that “golly, maybe we need to pack the Supreme Court,” that means that the horse has been out of the intellectual barn for some time. Again, this institution-wrecking radicalism is already a mainstream stance within her wider tribe. It’s fast-approaching “requirement” status, joining anti-Israel fanaticism.
And in spite of Harris’s less-than-snappy “no bad ideas” slogan, court-packing is a profoundly bad idea — as is state-adding, also known as Senate-packing. If this Rubicon is crossed, the opposing side will have no choice but to retaliate at the very first opportunity, even if these moves would be aimed at ensuring solidified, quasi-permanent power for the Left. Republicans would have no choice but to add new red states, and thus GOP senators. They’d expand the Supreme Court again, further crushing the legitimacy of the institution.
This is a path to ruin. It is frightening that it’s becoming something of a consensus in many leftist quarters. And none of it is about any sort of noble cause or true “reform.” It’s about seizing and entrenching power, as evidenced by the reality that they never dreamed of such appalling actions when they were consistently winning. It’s ends-driven destruction. Both parties should stiff-arm the braying of elements of their respective bases and reject the elimination of the legislative filibuster. They should reject adding states for partisan advantage. They should absolutely reject court-packing.
Our moment demands fortifying institutions against fleeting passions, not the opposite. Pushing our republic and system of governance to the brink with such courses of action would be profoundly, and perhaps irreparably, reckless. The sane litmus test should be forswearing these horrific, short-sighted, country-endangering misadventures. The poison of an endless “Flight 93” electoral mindset should be defused, not vindicated and ratcheted up.
If any influential Democrats actually believe in “country over party” as anything other than a cynical slogan about the Republicans and Trump, saying “no” to this is the bare minimum.
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Increase the Supreme Court number of justices to 13 NOW! TODAY. EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!
Let President Trump appoint 4 NEW CONSERVATIVE JUSTICES!
MAKE THE DEMOCRATS FIGHT AGAINST IT!
MAKE THEM EXPEND ALL THEIR AMMO TELLING EVERYBODY WHY THIS IS A BAD IDEA!
Then they won't have any left should they regain the majority of both houses and the presidency at some future date...........
Why? So John Thune can do nothing to get them confirmed?
And Alaska Lisa and Rand Paul, et al
<>“Progressives” will whine about the Antonin Scalia vacancy<>
An Obama administration-hired assassin vacated Scalia.
Fast forward to the blown democrat attempts to vacate PDJT.
Once achieved, democrats will never again relinquish power.
The GOP wrings its hands and can do absolutely nothing with a majority in the House and Senate. If the Dems take over, they will impeach Trump and most of the cabinet, pack the Court, defund ICE, start arresting ICE officers, vote for reparations, bail out Blue States, and start implementing Communism. And the GOP will still wring their hands and cry that there is nothing they can do.
Leftists should not be sate or sacred either.
Whenever Democrats talk about reform they mean the rules need to be changed to give them more power.
This applies to all the Dem/Socialist/Woke actions and speeches for a long time now.
Excellent radio host Alex Marlow today: The Dems are totally ruthless; the GOP is not.
Correct.
Everything they advocate for results in the exact opposite that they say it is for.
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink”
― George Orwell, 1984
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“ The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“This is how you put an end to this chicanery:
Increase the Supreme Court number of justices to 13 NOW! TODAY. EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!
Let President Trump appoint 4 NEW CONSERVATIVE JUSTICES!
MAKE THE DEMOCRATS FIGHT AGAINST IT!
MAKE THEM EXPEND ALL THEIR AMMO TELLING EVERYBODY WHY THIS IS A BAD IDEA!
Then they won’t have any left should they regain the majority of both houses and the presidency at some future date........... “
Exactly
if they packed it, we could simply pack it further by doubling it again if needed.
The whole concept is stupid.
You operate under the false premise that Democrats would care that they held a different position in the past
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