Within thirteen days this summer, two of the most senior figures in the Democratic Party stood before separate national audiences and called for rebuilding the structure of our democratic government. Former Vice President Kamala Harris said the country needs to revisit expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices, doing away with the Electoral College, and granting statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that dramatic Supreme Court reform is necessary, and that a variety of options are on the table that he is not willing to rule out. Both of these politicians know exactly how our system of government works, and neither one told the audience that the changes they proposed cannot be delivered. Instead, they served up crowd-pleasing proposals that garnered rounds of applause. This is the latest political sales gimmick, and it delivers nothing to the country except more anger and division.
Senior Democratic leaders are selling changes to our system of government that would have to clear vote counts in Congress that are insurmountable, and possible constitutional amendments that are almost impossible to pull off. Meanwhile, the problems Americans actually expect Washington to solve remain largely untouched: immigration, the cost of education, Social Security’s solvency, and a national debt that grows every hour.
Let’s take each proposal one at a time. Harris made her remarks at the National Urban League conference in Nashville on July 31, and Jeffries made his remarks at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Atlanta on August 13, where The Wall Street Journal reported his call for dramatic reform. Neither leader walked the audience through what any one of these changes would actually require of Congress.
The first proposal was expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices. That change does not require touching the Constitution, because as The Wall Street Journal noted, the number of justices is not fixed in the document. Congress could do it with an ordinary law, which means a bill that passes the House, passes the Senate, and is signed by the president. The Senate is where such a bill would die. The Wall Street Journal reported that even if Democrats win back both chambers this fall, a court bill would still need 60 votes in the 100-member Senate unless Democrats first eliminate the filibuster, which is the Senate rule that lets a minority block a bill by preventing a final vote. The Journal also reported that Jeffries supports major changes to those Senate rules, and that position amounts to an admission that the rules as they stand block the reform he is calling for. Even if a bill somehow cleared both chambers, President Trump could veto it, and he holds that power until his term ends in January 2029.
The last time Congress changed the size of the Supreme Court was 1869, when a law signed by President Grant set it at nine members. It has stayed at nine ever since. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed expanding the court to as many as 15 justices after the justices struck down parts of his New Deal, and The Washington Post reported that the plan drew pushback from Republicans as well as many of his fellow Democrats. Roosevelt held majorities far larger than any Democratic leader will hold next year, yet he still could not do it, because his own party understood that a door built to swing one way swings back.
The public is not clamoring for this, and scholars warn it would make matters worse. A May survey by Marquette Law School found Americans split evenly on expanding the court, 50 percent in favor and 50 percent opposed. Term limits are usually presented as the moderate option in this debate. They are not. The bill Senate Democrats reintroduced in July would hold justices to 18 years and then fill the resulting vacancies on a regular two-year schedule. Written that way, every presidential term would come with a guaranteed number of Supreme Court appointments, which would turn every presidential election into an open contest for specific seats on the bench. Daniel Epps of Washington University and Ganesh Sitaraman of Vanderbilt Law School argued in a 2019 paper against both term limits and expansion of the court, because each one risks pulling the institution further into partisan politics. Epps told The Washington Post that this is the first court whose ideology maps directly onto partisan affiliation. Adding four justices chosen by a single party would not repair that problem. It would make it permanent.
The senators sponsoring recent 18-year term-limit court bills do not dispute the odds. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who introduced the term limits bill, told The Washington Post that “even in a Congress like this one, where these bills have no chance of passage, it’s really important to file them and to stand by them, because they reassure people that there is in fact a mechanism by which the court could be restored to some degree of better order.” Consider what he just admitted. A United States senator explained that his own legislation exists to make people feel better, not to become law. This is not governance. This is pure politics.
The second proposal was revisiting the Electoral College, which in practice means eliminating the system this country uses to elect a president. That one is far harder than adding justices. The way we choose a president is written into the Constitution, so changing it requires a constitutional amendment. An amendment needs two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and then ratification by 38 of the 50 states. Nothing approaching two-thirds support exists in either chamber today, and the smaller states that gain influence from the current arrangement have no reason to surrender that advantage. Asking three-quarters of the states to surrender their own influence over who becomes president is not a governing strategy. It is a dream that will never come true.
The third proposal was statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and Harris added the condition that it should happen only if the residents of those places want it. Statehood takes an act of Congress and nothing more, which puts it on the same road as court expansion. Any statehood bill would have to survive that same 60-vote threshold in the Senate, and then it would need a presidential signature that is not coming from this White House.
Democrats may well win the House in November. But this new majority arriving in January is showing no signs of partnering with Republicans to fix the immigration system, to shore up a Social Security retirement fund that the program’s own trustees now project will run short in late 2032, or to slow a national debt that keeps climbing.
We do not have to guess what they will do instead, because both parties have already announced it. Reuters reported this month that House Democrats are building an investigative campaign of subpoenas, compelled testimony and contempt proceedings, and that impeachment is being held in reserve rather than taken off the table. A senior Democratic aide told Reuters, “We’re not going into this to impeach. No one wants a failed vote on day one.” Republicans are preparing the other half of the show. Axios reported that they will hold their first ever midterm convention in Dallas next month, built around the argument that the Democratic Party has been captured by its activist left, and that they have collected video of left-wing Democrats to run throughout the event. One person involved described the supply of material to Axios by saying, “Our video trove is endless.” Reuters counted the president using the word communism 81 times in a single two-week stretch this summer.
This country cannot go on like this for another two years. The cycle of attack and counterattack is wearing away the fabric of the nation.
There is another way to govern. The sixth principle of the Centercratic Party asks leaders to build policies that can earn broad and lasting support. That is not some nostalgic fantasy. America has done it before. The Clean Air Act Amendments passed the Senate 89 to 10 in 1990. The Social Security rescue of 1983 passed 58 to 14. Both endure because neither belonged exclusively to one party. The country owned them.
Sadly, this country will continue to rot for another two years while the parties bicker endlessly over who gets to run it.
Gallup reported in January that a record 45 percent of Americans now identify with neither party, while 27 percent claim the Democrats and 27 percent claim the Republicans. When will the largest group in American politics finally rise up and put a stop to this nonsense?