How reforming the Supreme Court could backfire on Democrats 

Labeling the Supreme Court “basically a subsidiary of the MAGA Republican Party,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) recently called for “dramatic” reforms. Furious over court decisions on voting rights, campaign finance, presidential immunity and abortion, Democrats have proposed adding justices, imposing 18-year term limits, limiting the court’s emergency docket, enacting a mandatory ethics code, and restricting the court’s jurisdiction to hear presidential immunity appeals.

Despite his own complaints over the recent decisions on tariffs and birthright citizenship, President Trump, meanwhile, has accused “Radical Left Democrats” of “calling for an illegal and unconstitutional attack on our SACRED United States Supreme Court.” And the Republican National Committee has included opposition to any changes in its 2024 platform. 

Neither party, however, questions the court’s authority to declare federal statutes unconstitutional. Perhaps they should.

In an illuminating new book, “Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People,” Harvard Law Professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan mount a credible challenge to the conventional wisdom. They detail how the Supreme Court came to assert the authority to overrule Congress — and how fiercely contested that claim has been. The consequences, they argue, have rendered the U.S. “less a nation of laws enacted by the people” than one governed by nine lawyers in robes.

Their concern is not vertical review — that is, invalidating state laws under the Constitution’s supremacy clause — but horizontal review, the power of federal judges to overturn the judgments of Congress.

Nothing in the Constitution specifies how such disputes should be resolved. At the nation’s founding, James Madison and most Democratic-Republicans insisted that allowing unelected federal judges to........

© The Hill