Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

We’ve expanded the Supreme Court before. It’s time to do so again.

Supreme Court expansion protest

People demonstrated outside the White House in December, calling on President Biden to support adding more justices to the Supreme Court.

Paul Morigi/Getty Images

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.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

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.

Read More

U.S. President Donald Trump holds up a signed executive order as (L-R) U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum look on in the Oval Office of the White House on April 09, 2025 in Washington, DC.

U.S. President Donald Trump holds up a signed executive order as (L-R) U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum look on in the Oval Office of the White House on April 09, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Getty Images, Anna Moneymaker

President Trump Invokes Emergency Powers for New Tariffs

In his April 2 executive order on tariffs and previous orders announcing tariffs on Chinese, Canadian, and Mexican imports, President Trump used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977.

This raises two important questions: Do the National Emergencies Act and IEEPA allow the President to set tariffs, and is the current economic state actually an emergency? (We also covered some tariff history on our full post here, and here on the projected impact, Trump's rationale, and Congress's response.)

Keep ReadingShow less
Innovative Local Solutions Can Ease America’s Housing Crisis
aerial photography of rural
Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash

Innovative Local Solutions Can Ease America’s Housing Crisis

Across the country, families are prevented from accessing safe, stable, affordable housing—not by accident, but by design. Decades of exclusionary zoning, racial discrimination, and disinvestment have created a housing system that works well for the wealthy but leaves others behind. Even as federal cuts to public housing programs continue nationwide, powerful, community-rooted efforts are pushing back and offering real, equity-driven solutions led by local voices.

Historically, states like New Jersey show what’s possible when legal advocacy and grassroots organizing come together. In 1975, the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel ruling established that every municipality in the state has a constitutional obligation to provide its fair share of affordable housing. This landmark legal ruling reshaped housing policy and set a national precedent. Today, organizations like Fair Share Housing Center continue to defend and expand this right, ensuring that local governments are prohibited from using zoning laws to exclude working-class families or people of color.

Keep ReadingShow less
Trump Welcomes Salvadoran President, Continuing To Collaborate With Far-Right World Leaders

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 14: U.S. President Donald Trump meets with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador in the Oval Office of the White House April 14, 2025 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Trump Welcomes Salvadoran President, Continuing To Collaborate With Far-Right World Leaders

WASHINGTON D.C. - President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would try to deport “as many as possible” immigrants or criminals to El Salvador. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele met with Trump at the White House to discuss the ongoing deportations of MS-13 and Tren de Aragua gang members to El Salvador’s notorious Center for Terrorism Confinement (CETOC).

Trump has now deported 238 individuals to El Salvador under the 1879 Alien Enemies Act without notice or due process of law. President Bukele has agreed to help Trump with his deportation goals and received $6 million from the White House to continue these efforts.

Keep ReadingShow less
Quiet Death of Dissent
woman in black hijab holding white and black printed board
Photo by Justin Essah on Unsplash

Quiet Death of Dissent

There is something particularly American about the way we're dismantling our democracy these days – we are doing it with paperwork. While the world watches our grand political theater, immigration agents are quietly canceling visas, filling out deportation orders, and reshaping the boundaries of acceptable speech without firing a single shot.

I think about Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and Columbia graduate who committed no crime beyond speaking his mind. I think about Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts whose academic career hangs by a thread. I think about the estimated 300 international students whose visas are under review or already revoked for daring to participate in First Amendment exercises on campus across the United States. These stories are not just about immigration status but about who is American enough to participate in its democracy and under what conditions.

Keep ReadingShow less