Sarkar is deputy communications director and press secretary for Stand Up America.
With the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade generating shockwaves across the country, Supreme Court expansion is once again emerging as a serious proposal in response to the extreme partisanship overtaking our nation’s highest court. Throughout our nation’s history, federal lawmakers have expanded and reduced the size of the Supreme Court several times to ensure a bench that provides prudent and fair judicial review.
The history of court expansion demonstrates that not only has the court’s size changed many times — changes to the number of seats on the bench are the logical outcome of the Framers’ intent for the Supreme Court.
While the Framers of our Constitution established the Supreme Court as the highest judicial body in the land, they left the particulars of the court for Congress to decide, including the size of the bench, the scope of the court’s jurisdiction, and the length of justices’ tenure. In the early days of our nation, the very first Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789 establishing a Supreme Court of six justices. Since then, the size of the court has fluctuated.
It reached 10 justices during the Civil War, and Congress attempted to shrink the bench to five after the election of 1800 (although it reversed that change before it could go into effect). Some experts contend that the court’s wartime expansion was intended to help President Abraham Lincoln deliver a Union victory and bring an end to slavery by appointing more anti-slavery Republicans to the bench.
Expanding the Supreme Court to advance a political agenda or protect our fundamental rights is neither new nor nefarious — these politically informed changes to the size of the bench are inherent to the Framers’ delegation of the court’s design to Congress. As the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority threatens to overturn our long-held constitutional right to an abortion, it is ever more the moral and constitutional imperative of Congress to check the court when Americans' fundamental rights are at stake.
Today, progressive activists are leading the charge to rebalance the undemocratically appointed conservativate supermajority and restore public trust in our nation’s highest court. Like most laws, one adding justices to the bench requires a majority vote in each chamber. But in the era of rampant abuse of the filibuster, the Senate would need a supermajority of 60 votes on a procedural matter just to get to a vote on final passage and send it to President Biden’s desk. Unless Democrats end the Senate filibuster by November and pass the Judiciary Act, the odds of rebalancing the court’s ideological scales in the near future are slim.
But not impossible.
The most serious current congressional proposal for court expansion would add four seats to the bench. The rationale behind that number? Doing so would bring the size of the bench into alignment with the number of circuit courts in our country’s legal system, which has been the case throughout most of our history. The Supreme Court’s upcoming decisions on life-or-death issues — like the right to an abortion and the right to be safe from gun violence — are also likely to serve as a movement catalyst for a growing number of Americans. The outrage people expressed over the court’s intent to strike down Roe v. Wade is just the beginning.
Court expansion aims to restore ideological balance on the bench that Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell stacked with three right-wing appointments: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. This, in tandem with McConnell’s refusal to allow outgoing Barack Obama to appoint Merrick Garland to the bench but permitting Trump to appoint Barrett in the final days of his presidency, justifiably outraged Democrats who were not only denied their party’s rightful choice in Obama’s second term, but sidelined while Trump got his choice under an entirely different set of rules.
Because of Trump’s flurry of appointments to the Supreme Court, there is now an overwhelming 6-3 conservative supermajority — one that fails to uphold the constitutional rights of the American people. No wonder the current Supreme Court hit an historically low approval rating of 40 percent after its shadow docket decision to allow a controversial Texas abortion law to stand despite national outrage against the bill’s clearly unconstitutional restriction on reproductive rights. What’s more, in a poll conducted after that, more than half of registered voters expressed some level of support for court expansion to rebalance the bench away from an extreme political agenda and back toward upholding the Constitution.
If the conservative supermajority accurately represented the American public’s values and priorities, expansion might not be needed. But the bench is radically out of step with the majority of Americans and its constitutional purpose of defending the rights of all people, especially minorities — as was the case during Lincoln’s wartime court expansion effort. Today, the Supreme Court iis not just protecting the Trumpian minority its majority is politically beholden to; now, the court is actually stripping guaranteed rights and freedoms from the majority of Americans who want those rights and freedoms — bodily autonomy, the right to breathe clean air, to not be terrified of gun violence at school or work — that have long been taken for granted.
To restore the legitimacy of and public confidence in the Supreme Court, Congress must leverage its power to check the court’s conservative supermajority and its partisan agenda by adding justices who will fairly apply legal precedent and bring an end to the rampaging radicalism that has hijacked our nation’s highest court. In the end, this is not an argument for Democrats to overtake the Court — it is a resounding demand from the majority of Americans to save our court from the ongoing right-wing takeover and ensure that upholding the Constitution remains the Supreme Court’s sole objective.
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.