Good morning. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) on Thursday said he was very supportive of making major structural reforms to the Supreme Court, alleging it had become a "subsidiary" of the Make America Great Again movement.
He's tapping into something coursing through the Democratic Party.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris last month said policymakers should revisit the idea of expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court from nine to 13. This would essentially take away the Republicans current 6-3 majority on the court (unless, of course, the four additional justices were also appointed by Republicans).
And Democrats have for years called for imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices. Currently, justices can serve in their posts for life, unless they step down or are impeached (only one justice has ever been impeached, in the early 1800s, and he ended up staying on the bench).
There has been a broader discussion about tightening ethical rules surrounding Supreme Court justices in the past decade, but that hasn't made any traction in Congress.
The biggest challenge to what Jeffries and Harris are talking about is the logistics of it. It most certainly wouldn't be tackled in a bipartisan way, so Democrats would need to win the 2026 midterm elections and then build on that by winning the 2028 presidential election too. Even then, it would take either major changes to the filibuster rule in the Senate or an overwhelming Senate majority to accomplish some of these changes.
Still, Jeffries is on the hot seat with a lot of the Democratic base these days. So he might feel like a big promise like tackling the Supreme Court helps unify the fractured Democratic Party.