Oct
11
Why Leftists Want to Eliminate or Pack the U.S. Supreme Court
I have been getting behind in my Imprimis reading lately, but then the other day I read “Why We Shouldn’t Cancel the Supreme Court” — based on a speech by Jonathan Turley and adapted for the Sept. 2026 issue of Imprimis — and decided to make a pair of blogposts from it.
I first heard Turley via his multiple guest appearances on The Hugh Hewitt Show 20+ years ago. (Maybe he still does that. I dunno.) For those not that familiar with Turley, he is an attorney, legal scholar, and commentator. He holds the position of J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University Law School and previously taught at Tulane University Law School. He has written for several publications, including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal, and in his spare time he authored a couple books: The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage (2024) and Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution (2026).
In this first blogpost, I have cited from the first 1/3 or so of the article, in which Turley compares the foundational attitudes of the American and French Revolutions and how the latter finds parallel in the Left’s current push to remake the highest levels of the American judiciary. Pay attention…
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Today’s attacks on the American judiciary do indeed harken back to the rhetoric that raged before the advent of “The Terror” in revolutionary France — the rhetoric that gave rise to the kind of “mobocracy” that the Founders sought to avoid by designing our constitutional order as they did.
To help understand this, it is useful to recall the fundamental differences between the American Revolution, which led to the world’s oldest and most prosperous republic, and the French Revolution, which led to a short-lived, blood-soaked tyranny. Both revolutions were based on Enlightenment ideas. But America’s revolution was closely tied to the political philosophy of John Locke, who held that our rights come not from the government, but from God. The institutional arrangements of the Constitution, including the independent court system, were designed to protect these God-given individual rights.
Conversely, the French Revolution was inspired in the end not by Lockean principles but by the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which extolled the “general will” of the people and opposed institutions (including courts) that interfered with that will. This concept of a general or popular will served as a license for French revolutionaries like Robespierre — who declared that “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible… a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy” — to unleash a torrent of executions that would eventually come to turn on the revolutionaries themselves.
There is a radical movement rising in the U.S. with chilling parallels to the French Revolution. Demands for the elimination or packing of the Supreme Court and other measures are ripped from the French revolutionary handbook. Most worrisome is the surrender of establishment figures, particularly in promising to make radical changes to the Supreme Court. Indeed, offering the Supreme Court up to this movement has become a litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and U.S. Representative Ro Khanna have embraced it. Harris and California Governor Gavin Newsom have characterized reluctance to change the Court as “nostalgia” and have warned that “nostalgia is not working.” The platform of the increasingly influential Democratic Socialists of America calls both for dissolving the Supreme Court and for creating a unicameral legislature by eliminating the U.S. Senate.
Much of this is animated by undisguised power politics. Here’s former Attorney General Eric Holder arguing that packing the Supreme Court should be made a priority: “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.” And Democratic strategist James Carville: “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should expand the Supreme Court to 13…. Eat our dust. Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.” Harvard Law School Professor Michael Klarman has laid out an agenda by which the Democrats can guarantee that they will never lose another election but warns that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything [that agenda consists of].”
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has characterized the Court as illegitimate because it has rendered decisions against what she sees as “widely held public opinion.” Former U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell similarly objected that the Court “defies the will of the people.” U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is now leading in some Democratic presidential polls, asks why we even have a Supreme Court: “How much does the current structure benefit us? … I don’t think it does.”
The irony is that those calling to pack the Court say it will make the Court “less partisan.” Buttigieg has suggested not only expanding the Court from nine to 15 justices, but also having each party appoint five members, with those ten justices then selecting the remaining five. Such a court would then operate like the Federal Election Commission currently does, with party loyalists voting the party line.
This way of thinking runs completely counter to our nation’s founding principles….
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So, that gives you some background, which is rather elucidating on its own. My post next week will continue with additional citations from Turley’s speech/article, which will look at why it is not a good idea to either eliminate or pack the Supreme Court.
