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Packing the Supreme Court is no longer a fringe idea

But is it a good idea?

Kamala Harris wants to talk about packing the Supreme Court.

Last Wednesday, during a video event hosted by the advocacy group Win With Black Women, the former vice president rattled off a long list of democracy reforms that could be part of an “expanded playbook” Democrats can use to reverse a series of recent policy losses, including the Republican Supreme Court’s recent decision repealing a 1982 amendment to the Voting Right Act.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

Harris’s list included Puerto Rican and DC statehood, multimember congressional districts, a binding ethics code for Supreme Court justices, and a vague proposal to reform or eliminate the Electoral College. It also included “the idea of Supreme Court reform, which includes expanding the Supreme Court.”

Court-packing, or adding seats to a court in order to change its ideological or partisan makeup, was considered an exceedingly radical idea as recently as a decade ago. President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed adding seats to the Supreme Court shortly after his landslide victory in the 1936 presidential election, but his proposal landed with a thud in Congress, and many historians blame Roosevelt’s court-packing plan for shattering the coalition that allowed him to enact the New Deal.

Since then, most US political leaders have approached the idea with trepidation. President Joe Biden tried to placate Democrats angered by the Republican Party’s dominance of the Supreme Court by appointing a toothless advisory commission. Harris inartfully tried to dance around the topic when it came up in her 2020 debate with former Vice President Mike Pence.

But the idea has grown increasingly mainstream in the past 10 years. In February, Utah Republicans packed their state supreme court after that court backed a challenge to the state’s GOP-friendly congressional maps. Republicans also added seats to the Georgia and Arizona supreme courts in 2016.

Democratic support for court-packing, meanwhile, has largely come from iconoclasts or from relatively obscure politicians seeking to break through onto the national stage. Pete Buttigieg, who at the time was a small-city mayor making a long-shot bid for the presidency, proposed a complicated plan in 2019 to create an ideologically balanced Court of 15 justices. Graham........

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