Hakeem Jeffries has developed a habit of saying out loud what his party once preferred to keep vague.
Speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Atlanta, the House minority leader told the audience that Democrats see “[a] variety of different options that are on the table, and I think we can’t foreclose on any single one of them” when it comes to the Supreme Court. The options under discussion include adding justices and imposing 18-year term limits on the ones already seated. The man floating them runs the House Democratic caucus and stands one election away from the speaker’s gavel.
Jeffries also described the Court, in the same appearance, as “a subsidiary of the MAGA Republican Party.”
For years, Democrats have been more cautious about openly discussing expanding the Supreme Court, but now they’re not even hiding their intentions. Speaking at the National Urban League Conference in Nashville earlier this month, former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed expanding the court to thirteen justices.
“We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices like we have 13 District Courts,” she said.
There are 94 federal district courts. There are 13 circuit courts. If the number of justices is supposed to match the number of lower courts, Harris picked the wrong number – or the wrong argument.
NBC’s Kristen Welker put the question to Jeffries on Meet the Press on Sunday, noting Harris’s comments on the issue. Jeffries declined to say yes, and he declined to say no. “What I support is dramatic reform, and what that looks like, to begin with, is making sure that the Supreme Court actually has an ethical code of conduct so that they’re not able to simply conduct themselves in ways that are inconsistent with the notion in this country that no one is above the law,” he said.
Then he named names. “We’ve seen right-wing justices like Thomas and Alito engage in behavior that is ethically questionable at best,” Jeffries said. “That has to change, because the American people should have confidence in the highest court in the land.” The ethics talk served as the on-ramp. He went on to describe reforms needed to deliver a court “functioning like a separate and coequal branch of government,” and pointed to the Callais decision, where, according to Jeffries, “the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in ways that do the bidding of extreme MAGA Republicans who turned around in the deep south and unleashed these Jim Crow-like tactics, yes, I have a problem with that. It’s inconsistent with the law and with the Constitution.”
The same Court has ruled against Trump on birthright citizenship and on his tariff agenda, and he has won a lopsided share of the cases he has brought before it. Jeffries has not explained how a subsidiary rules against its parent.
What will those “reforms” look like? Jeffries wouldn’t say, but told Welker, “Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and other Judiciary Committee Dems are going to take the lead on what dramatic reform of the Supreme Court looks like,” Jeffries said. A caucus assigns committee leads for legislation it intends to write, and such legislation exists to change who wins cases.
A group of Senate Democrats introduced a bill last month establishing 18-year terms and creating a Supreme Court appointment every two years.
The math, of course, is a problem for this. Any such bill needs 60 votes in the Senate, and, as president, Trump can still veto anything the Democrats might pass. Democrats understand both facts, which makes the quieter half of Jeffries’ message worth a closer read. He endorsed major changes to Senate rules so a bare majority can pass legislation, and he invoked the last attempt, when Democrats held Congress and the White House under Joe Biden, and tried to nuke the filibuster for their election reform bills. The only thing that stopped that from happening was Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who refused to go along with the scheme, but neither is in the Senate anymore, and the party is much more unified today.
This is why Trump, who has seen the same math, has been warned that a Democratic majority will kill the filibuster to remake the court as a left-wing institution, and has urged Republicans to beat them to the punch, nuke the filibuster and help accelerate his agenda while they can. Trump has separately demanded that Jeffries apologize for calling the Court illegitimate.
Jeffries’ comments make clear that Democrats have no qualms about gutting longstanding institutions to make them work more for their party and its agenda, which means what’s at stake in the upcoming midterms and the 2028 election is bigger than just who controls Congress or the White House, it might very well change how our government works.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/18/2026 – 21:20
