The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has unleashed calls for institutional overhauls to expand the size of the Supreme Court or limit the time justices can serve — as well as outright threats to pack the bench, depending on who controls the Senate and the White House after November's election.
But the Supreme Court is not the problem.
The fresh cries to "fix the court" are ironic at best and hypocritical at worst. They echo the calls to "impeach Earl Warren" that rang out in the 1950s, after that chief justice wrote the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared segregated schools unconstitutional.
Then, as now, the problem was not the nation's high court. It was the septic politics — then of segregation, now of raw partisan division — that infected the country.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, reactions to septic politics were similar to today's calls to fix the Supreme Court. Instead of ostracizing its members who had perpetuated segregation, Congress reorganized the seniority system and created a multitude of new committees and subcommittees. Instead of taking a stand against segregationist senators and House members — other than rejecting their ideology to enact landmark voting rights and civil rights legislation — Congress replaced a few of the committee fiefdoms they'd controlled with a multitude of new ones. And that made Capitol Hill a much more difficult place to lead or control. So politics remained septic.
Similarly, to "fix" the electoral system, Congress enacted campaign spending laws that essentially privatized the election process and set in motion the forces that now make elections extraordinarily expensive, uncompetitive and gerrymandered to perpetuate control by the two major parties.
Instead of bridging political divisions, Congress enacted institutional reforms that simply proliferated the number of divisions and deepened them. The two major parties are as polarized as ever, more internally divided than ever -- and still comfortably ensconced in power thanks to campaign finance laws that discriminate against third parties and independent candidates.
As Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution has written, the nation continues to pay the price for these so-called reforms. They created the political system that enabled Donald Trump to beat the Republicans and then beat the Democrats. It remains possible he could do it again this November. "Fixing" the Supreme Court by limiting tenure or adding seats will do nothing to overcome the political divisions or fix the political machinery that elevated and has sustained the incumbent president.
More likely, any such rushed alterations would have the sort of undesirable and unforeseen consequences that inevitably arise from hastily conceived policies that are driven more by partisan fervor than by wisdom.
So let's leave the Supreme Court alone. Despite the debasement of the confirmation process that began with President Ronald Reagan's failed nomination of Robert Bork 33 years ago, the court still operates collegially and effectively. Despite the complaints about how Republican appointees now dominate the bench, abortion remains a right, the Affordable Care Act has not been struck down, gay marriage is constitutionally protected and employers may not discriminate against people based on gender or sexuality. Perennially, the court receives the highest approval ratings among the branches of the federal government.
Instead of overhauling the Supreme Court, perhaps lawmakers and other aspiring fixers might first give Congress itself some homework. Before turning on the court, perhaps Congress could first demonstrate a capacity to put partisanship aside and pursue an agenda that is unquestionably bipartisan and clearly in the national interest. A better coronavirus testing plan? Perhaps a dollar-a-gallon additional federal tax on gasoline to cut greenhouse emissions and support sustainability research? Maybe a fix for the public schools?
The Supreme Court is not broken. So don't fix it. Instead, Congress should demonstrate that it can choose to fix the politics and policies that need fixing.
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.