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The Gaping Hole in El-Sayed’s Progressive Agenda

The Senate nominee has woefully undercooked ideas on Supreme Court reform—and that’s a problem.

Abdul El-Sayed during a primary election night watch party.

Progressive doctor Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate last week over a wet blanket establishment Democrat, and the left has been on a high. Rightly so. El-Sayed is a progressive and a reformer who supports Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and an arms embargo on Israel. He’s young and energetic and does not, to my knowledge, have any Nazi-adjacent tattoos. He’s probably the best candidate progressives can hope for in a battleground state like Michigan. 

I support his candidacy enthusiastically, and I want people to remember I said that because I’m about to unload on him. 

For all of El-Sayed’s strong lefty credentials, he has so far come off like an unserious neophyte on the most crucial issue that is needed to unlock the progressive agenda: court reform. There is nothing that El-Sayed wants to do that he can do without reforming the Supreme Court. As a senator, he would be a critical vote towards reforming the Supreme Court and breaking its hammerlock over our society. 

El-Sayed seems to understand the importance of Supreme Court reform. For one thing, he lists it as a priority on his campaign website—and he’s actually talked about it, which is more than I can say for most democrats. He has said that the court “has become a major impediment to democracy.” So I’ll give him that. 

But for an issue that demands concrete constitutional and civic solutions, El-Sayed has been light on the details for solving the problem he’s correctly identified. The few details he has provided sound like he’s been playing Mad-libs with a ChatGPT “court reform” prompt. He has stitched together pleasing sounding buzzwords that amount to a fully incoherent strategy. In 2024 El-Sayed penned an article for the Detroit Metro Times which talked about court reform and came to the conclusion that… it’s complicated. He laid out all of the possible court reform plans and told readers that “we should try” something, without committing himself to any particular plan of action. If the question is “Does El-Sayed understand that there is a problem?” I’d answer “Yes.” If the question is “Does El-Sayed have a solution?” I’d be forced to answer, “What is this man even talking about?” 

As a candidate for Senate, El-Sayed got only slightly more specific. From what I can glean from his website and a TikTok video, his key proposal is term-limits for Supreme Court justices. Now, I’ve argued repeatedly that term-limits are the fool’s gold of court reform. They sound good, they’re politically popular, and they fix nothing. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think Supreme Court justices should hold lifetime power. But I’m far more concerned with how they wield their power than I am with the amount of time they get to hold it. Term limits do nothing to stop the current court, and the current evil it’s doing. Even the promise that the current justices will be replaced at some point in the future ignores the fact that they might well be replaced by people who are just as committed as they are to continuing their predecessors’ crusades against human rights and democracy. 

Moreover, term-limits are the hardest thing to do from a constitutional perspective. All of the other court reforms—from court expansion to jurisdiction stripping to ethics reform—can be done without a constitutional amendment. But there’s really no way to........

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