Congressional Democrats are pressing a suite of bills to expand the Supreme Court, cap justices' tenure, and force transparency on emergency rulings, proposals that cannot pass a Republican Senate or survive a presidential veto but that signal a campaign-season escalation against the court's conservative majority.
The legislative blitz spans three tracks. Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia are again championing the Judiciary Act, first introduced in 2021, which would add four seats to the bench and bring the total from nine justices to 13. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, joined by Sens. Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, and Alex Padilla, reintroduced the Supreme Court Biennial Appointments and Term Limits Act in July. And Sens. Dick Durbin and Blumenthal, alongside Rep. Deborah Ross of North Carolina, have revived the Shadow Docket Sunlight Act, which would require the court to publish written reasoning and vote counts on emergency orders. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland introduced a companion shadow-docket package in May.
None of these measures can clear a Republican Senate or reach President Trump's desk in the current Congress. That political reality has not stopped Democratic leaders, or prospective 2028 presidential contenders, from treating the proposals as a rallying point heading into the midterms.
Supporters of the Judiciary Act argue that a 13-seat court would align the bench with the 13 federal appellate circuits. The bill's backers frame the change as structural modernization. Critics, led by Republicans on both judiciary committees, call it what it plainly is: court-packing designed to dilute a conservative majority that Democrats cannot beat at the ballot box or through the confirmation process.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio has moved in the opposite direction. Jordan said Republicans will force a vote on a constitutional amendment fixing the court at nine justices, a direct counter to the expansion drive. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa has backed keeping the court at nine and has called 18-year terms a threat to judicial independence.
The Republican position reflects a straightforward principle: the size of the court should not fluctuate with whichever party holds a temporary legislative majority. Democrats held unified control of Congress and the White House as recently as 2021, 2023 and did not pass expansion then. Reviving the idea now, out of power and ahead of an election, suggests the proposals serve more as campaign messaging than serious legislation.
The term-limits measure would cap active service at 18 years, with a new justice appointed every two years on a staggered schedule. After their 18 years on the full docket, justices would shift to a senior role handling a narrow set of constitutionally required matters. Whitehouse told Bloomberg Law in June that the term-limits track is his priority.
"My term limits bill is where I am."
That one sentence captures a split inside the Democratic caucus. Not every member pushing court restructuring agrees on the method. Expansion carries the heaviest political freight and the most obvious partisan motive. Term limits poll better with the public but face their own constitutional questions. Both paths would almost certainly draw immediate legal challenges, and those challenges would land before the very justices the legislation targets.
The court's current composition remains a source of frustration for Democrats, who have watched the conservative majority shape rulings on issues from firearms to climate litigation. The bench has recently agreed to hear major Second Amendment cases and a landmark climate-liability dispute, decisions that underscore why the left views structural change as its best remaining lever.
The shadow docket, the court's practice of issuing emergency orders without full briefing, oral argument, or signed opinions, has drawn bipartisan academic criticism for years. Democrats have now turned it into a legislative and party-platform cause.
The Shadow Docket Sunlight Act from Durbin, Blumenthal, and Ross would force the court to explain its reasoning and disclose how each justice voted on emergency orders. Raskin's companion House package targets the same practice. At the Democratic National Committee's summer meeting, members unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the shadow docket, a signal that the issue has moved from legal-academic debate into midterm campaign infrastructure.
Shadow-docket reform is the least radical of the three tracks, and it is the one most likely to attract sympathy beyond the Democratic base. Requiring written reasoning on emergency orders is a transparency measure, not a structural overhaul. But packaging it alongside court expansion and term limits lets Democrats present the entire suite as a single reform agenda, and lets Republicans argue that the transparency bill is a Trojan horse for the more aggressive measures behind it.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg have both publicly endorsed expanding the court to 13 seats. Neither has formally announced a 2028 presidential campaign, but their willingness to back the most aggressive restructuring option tells Democratic primary voters where the party's presidential aspirants believe the energy is.
Whitehouse, meanwhile, has been described as a potential chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee if Democrats retake the chamber in the midterms. That prospect gives the term-limits and shadow-docket bills a plausible path to committee hearings, though floor passage and a presidential signature would remain out of reach as long as a Republican occupies the White House.
Justice Samuel Alito's recent confirmation that he intends to remain on the bench has only sharpened Democratic urgency. With no vacancies on the horizon and a conservative majority firmly in place, structural overhaul is the only route left for a party that cannot change the court's direction through normal appointments.
The Washington Post characterized the Democratic push as having reached "a fever pitch." That framing suits the party's midterm strategy: energize the base with an ambitious court-reform agenda, blame Republican obstruction when it stalls, and carry the issue into 2028 as a presidential-campaign promise.
Jordan's constitutional-amendment gambit, fixing the court at nine by enshrining the number in the Constitution, would require two-thirds of both chambers and ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures. It is no more likely to pass than the Democratic expansion bills. But it serves the same political function in reverse: it lets Republicans frame themselves as defenders of institutional stability while casting Democrats as willing to break the court to get the rulings they want.
Grassley's objection to 18-year terms rests on a principle older than the current partisan fight. Article III of the Constitution grants federal judges life tenure during "good behaviour." Whether Congress can impose a fixed term without amending the Constitution is an open legal question, one that Whitehouse's bill tries to sidestep by shifting justices to a senior role rather than removing them from the bench entirely. Legal scholars remain divided on whether that workaround survives constitutional scrutiny, and the bill's sponsors have not identified a clear path past the challenge.
President Trump has been a frequent litigant before the court he helped shape through three appointments. The administration recently brought a high-profile case to the justices over White House construction disputes, a reminder that the current court's willingness to hear executive-branch arguments is itself a grievance for Democrats who believe the majority is too deferential to this president.
Every bill in this package faces the same dead end: a Republican Senate, a Republican president, and a conservative court that would almost certainly strike down any measure that reached it. The Democrats pushing these proposals know that. The bills are not designed to become law in this Congress. They are designed to become campaign ads.
That does not make them harmless. Normalizing the idea that the Supreme Court's size and structure should bend to the preferences of whichever party holds power erodes the independence the judiciary is supposed to have. Every time a serious senator introduces a bill to pack the court with four new seats, the next attempt, by either party, becomes a little easier to imagine and a little harder to oppose on principle.
The DNC's unanimous shadow-docket resolution, the coordinated bill introductions across both chambers, and the endorsements from Harris and Buttigieg all point in the same direction: Democrats are building a midterm and presidential platform around the proposition that the Supreme Court is broken and only Democratic control of Congress can fix it.
When a party cannot win on the merits before the court, cannot win enough elections to reshape it through appointments, and cannot muster the votes to change it through legislation, the honest answer is to make a better case to voters. Rewriting the rules of the institution you keep losing in front of is not reform, it is the kind of self-serving power grab the Constitution was written to prevent.
