Something has shifted in how Democrats talk about the Supreme Court — and it’s about time.

For years, court reform was treated as a fringe idea. Expand the Court? Too radical. Term limits? Too destabilizing. A binding ethics code? Maybe, someday, if we can find the votes. The conventional wisdom held that the Court, however flawed, was too sacred an institution to touch with structural changes.

That conventional wisdom is crumbling. And the redistricting and voting rights rulings of the past few months are exactly why.

The Evidence Has Been Accumulating

You cannot look at what this Court has done to American elections and conclude that it is behaving as a neutral legal institution. The evidence is too consistent, the pattern too clear.

In March, the Court issued an unsigned, unexplained emergency order keeping New York’s 11th Congressional District map in place — a map that a state court had ruled unconstitutional because it diluted the voting power of Black and Latino residents. The remedy was blocked. The elections will proceed on an illegal map. We don’t know how many justices voted for it. We don’t know what legal standard was applied. The order simply arrived, at odd hours, and reshaped the political landscape.

Around the same time, the Court allowed Texas to use a congressional map that a trial court found had been redrawn to target the seats of five Black and Latino members of Congress. Six conservatives in the majority. Three liberals in dissent. No explanation required.

Then, on April 29, the Court delivered the capstone. In Louisiana v. Callais, a 6-3 majority all but nullified Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the provision that for four decades allowed courts to strike down district maps that produced discriminatory results, even without proving intentional racism. The majority now requires proof of intentional discrimination, a standard that, as Justice Kagan wrote in dissent, renders the provision “all but a dead letter.” Within hours of the ruling, Florida lawmakers advanced a new congressional map targeting majority-minority districts. The same pattern — erase the protection, redraw the map — is now playing out from statehouses to school boards across the South.

And lurking behind all of this is the long shadow of Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 ruling in which Chief Justice Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement — the federal mechanism that had required states with histories of discrimination to get approval before changing their voting laws. Roberts wrote that the old formula was outdated. Things had changed.

Twelve years later, the same Court that decided states couldn’t be trusted to protect minority voting rights with federal oversight is now blocking state courts that try to protect those rights on their own. The logic only coheres if the goal was never about federalism. The goal was dismantling minority voter protection, layer by layer.

The Binary Choice

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has put the stakes plainly: you can have democratic self-government, or you can have the corrupt Court as it currently operates. You cannot have both.

That framing is worth sitting with, because it captures something that careful institutional language tends to obscure. A Court that picks election winners through unexplained emergency orders is not a neutral arbiter of the law. A Court whose members face no binding ethics enforcement, no term limits, and no democratic accountability — and which uses that insulation to lock in partisan electoral outcomes — is not a Court operating within its proper constitutional role. It is a Court that has made itself into a political actor while claiming the immunity of a legal one.

Chief Justice Roberts, to his credit, recently complained publicly that “the public is misinformed” about the Court’s political nature. This, said weeks after the shadow docket orders on New York and Texas redistricting. The complaint is extraordinary in its self-unawareness. The public is not misinformed. The public is watching the Court issue unsigned orders that decide which party controls the House, and drawing the obvious conclusion.

Democrats Are Finally Warming Up

Something meaningful is now happening on the political left. Democrats are beginning to coalesce around court reform as a non-negotiable issue rather than a distant aspiration.

Reports from inside the party suggest that court expansion may soon function as a litmus test for Democratic candidates — the kind of position that primary voters expect candidates to hold, rather than a fringe proposal that serious people are supposed to politely set aside. The Bulwark recently published a newsletter titled “Get Ready for the Dem Court-Expansion Litmus Test.” That would have been unthinkable five years ago.

This is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening because the Court’s behavior has made the cost of inaction visible in concrete, measurable terms. Every election run on an illegal map is a cost. Every minority voter whose power is diluted by a district the Court has shielded from remedy is a cost. Every unsigned order that a party obtains by forum-shopping directly to the Supreme Court, bypassing state courts that haven’t even weighed in yet, is a cost.

The case for reform is not abstract anymore. It is a specific pattern of outcomes that falls consistently along partisan and racial lines.

The Obstacles Are Real — And Insufficient

Reform advocates are right to note that this is a heavy lift. It requires legislation. It requires Senate votes that have historically been impossible to assemble. It requires a willingness to break with a certain kind of institutional reverence that has always benefited the people already in power more than the people trying to change things.

None of that makes reform less necessary. The difficulty of a change is not an argument against it. The filibuster was also a heavy lift. Gerrymandering reform is a heavy lift. The heaviness is often itself a product of the same structural inequalities that reform is designed to address.

And the alternatives have been exhausted. Litigation has not fixed this Court; the Court rules on its own conduct. Norm-enforcement has not fixed this Court; the majority has demonstrated that it does not consider itself bound by the norms critics cite. Hoping that a future president will appoint better justices has not fixed this Court; the Federalist Society pipeline means that every Republican nominee arrives pre-committed to a specific jurisprudential worldview.

If the structure cannot be changed from inside the legal process, then the structure must be changed by the democratic process that created it. Congress has expanded and contracted the Court’s size six times in American history. Term limits require only legislation, not a constitutional amendment. A transparency requirement for shadow docket orders — mandating written reasoning, prohibiting action before lower courts have ruled — is achievable with a willing majority.

What Reform Must Include

The minimum viable reform package looks like this:

Court expansion to break the 6-3 supermajority that makes party-line redistricting orders possible. The exact number matters less than the principle: the current composition was engineered through a stolen seat and a rushed confirmation, and it is delivering results consistent with that engineering.

Eighteen-year term limits with staggered appointments, so that every elected president gets a guaranteed seat and no single political moment defines the Court for a generation. This is also the most popular structural reform — polling consistently shows majority support across party lines.

Shadow docket reform requiring written reasoning for every emergency order, and prohibiting the Court from acting before the relevant lower courts have had a full opportunity to rule. The Court should not be deciding which party controls the House through unexplained orders issued without briefing.

A binding ethics code with real enforcement — recusal standards, gift prohibition, disclosure requirements. This is the least controversial element and the one where the Court has been most visibly exposed. We’ve documented the need at length.

The Window

The argument for going slow on Court reform has always been: wait for the right moment, build the coalition, don’t overreach. That argument has been made for a decade. The Court has not waited. It has continued gutting the Voting Rights Act, shielding racially gerrymandered maps, and expanding the shadow docket while the patient coalition-builders have been waiting for the right moment.

The moment is now visible: a party that can make court reform a litmus test issue, a public that can see the concrete electoral costs of Court inaction, and a pattern of redistricting and voting rights rulings that makes the stakes undeniable.

You can have democratic self-government. Or you can have the Court as it currently operates, deciding elections from behind a wall of lifetime tenure, non-binding ethics, and unsigned emergency orders.

You cannot have both. And the longer that choice goes unmade, the more elections get run on illegal maps.

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