Congressional observers will remember Speaker Nancy Pelosi's infamous remark when the fate of the Obamacare bill was on the line a decade ago: The House needed to "pass the bill so that you can find out what's in it."
Now former Vice President Joe Biden's refusal to tell the nation his views on court-packing, unless he wins the presidency, is a reminder of those poorly chosen words.
Court-packing is adding seats to the Supreme Court or other benches, not replacing an open seat. A court-packing scheme would be a massive shift in power from the judiciary to the executive branch, one that eliminates one of the most important safeguards built into our Constitution. Over several decades, Congress has steadily ceded power to the president by ignoring its oversight mandate, not making tough budget decisions, handing over spending prerogatives and allowing administrations of both parties to substitute regulations for legislative action.
Court-packing would be a fundamental shift of judicial independence that leads down a very dangerous road to excessive executive power — because it would mean presidents could add politically sympathetic members until the Supreme Court is little more than a rubber stamp of the personal partisan policy preferences of the president.
And if a future president acquires the bulk of the powers the Constitution gave not only Congress but also the Supreme Court, such a dangerous amount of concentrated power would undermine the constitutional system of checks and balances.
In the fall of 2013, when Democrats were the Senate majority and eliminated the effective 60-vote threshold for almost all nominations, Mitch McConnell was the Republican minority leader warning the other side "you may regret this a lot sooner than you think." This week, of course, it was the GOP leveraging its majority power to seat Amy Coney Barrett on the high court just days before the election — and the minority Democrats crying foul and warning the other side it will rue the day.
But confirming judges to existing open seats is not court-packing. Court-packing means creating new judicial positions and filling them with judges believed to be on "your" side. This is what threatens the delicate balance between our three branches. Consider this: A federal court rules an executive order is unlawful, and the president gets a Congress run by his party to add three seats to the Supreme Court — so he can name justices he can count on to overturn that original ruling. That is court-packing. And it is dangerous to create a rubber stamp on one party's rule in Washington.
Every campaign season, the parties and outside groups square off for what they agree will be The Most Important Election Ever. That's led to voter fatigue, which is compounded by the media's shiny-object coverage that leaves people lurching from one story to the next. A recent report by my organization concluded that independent voters are weary of political rhetoric. They want clear plans, clear ideas and clear approaches to solving the very big challenges we're facing.
The Constitution establishes a government that makes laws to protect the entire community, without infringing on the rights of individuals. As George Washington wrote in his letter transmitting the completed Constitution to Congress: "Individuals entering into society must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest. ... It is at all times difficult to draw with precision the line between those rights which must be surrendered, and those which must be reserved."
This is the role of the Supreme Court, which the Framers established as an independent protector of individual rights against the legislative will of the majority, or the arbitrary use of power by the executive. A Supreme Court subjected to court-packing would surrender its independence and be judicially neutered.
Beyond that lies the real threat of the partisan minority's voice in governing getting totally silenced — if the ability to filibuster legislation gets suddenly neutralized in the Senate next year, the way judicial filibusters were made obsolete seven years ago.
That would be terrible for a country so closely split between the major parties as we have been for more than two decades.
Such an arrangement, if backed up by a newly packed Supreme Court, would allow the political majority to weaken other safeguards, such as control of redistricting and the admission of new states, that would further solidify its own control over the government. Citizens objecting to unconstitutional actions by the executive would be without recourse, because appeals to the Supreme Court would be futile.
Court-packing would be a massive gain for the concentration of presidential power and allow a dangerous amount of control by one party. It threatens to replace our two-party government, operating under a system of checks and balances, with an increasingly authoritarian executive backed up by a dominant majority with no meaningful opposition to act as a brake on his power.
Even the most partisan Democrats should be concerned about eliminating the independence of the judiciary. While they could bend the court into a willing participant in passing the most radical aspects of their legislative agenda, they do so at the risk of eliminating the essential safeguard to their own constitutional rights. History is replete with examples of power grabs that have gone bad — and there are very few examples of the rapid and excessive concentration of power that have turned out well.
Packing the court is a serious constitutional issue, demanding serious answers from the Democratic presidential challenger before it's too late. We cannot accept the notion that we need to wait for it to happen to see what it means.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.