Two reforms dominate every conversation about fixing the Supreme Court: term limits (ending life tenure in favor of fixed, staggered terms) and court expansion — usually called “court packing” by opponents — adding seats to the current nine. They get discussed together constantly and confused just as often. This page is the single, continuously updated reference for both: what they actually mean, the bills currently in Congress, whether they’re constitutional, what Americans actually think of each one, and how they stack up against each other.

The Short Version

  • Term limits would replace life tenure with fixed, staggered 18-year terms, so every president gets one nomination every two years regardless of when a justice happens to die or retire. Support: consistently 69–83% of Americans, including majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents.
  • Court expansion (“court packing”) would add seats to the Court by ordinary statute — something Congress has done seven times before, most recently in 1869. Support: roughly split down the middle, around 50/50.
  • Both require only an act of Congress to attempt. Neither requires a constitutional amendment, though a constitutional amendment version of term limits has also been separately proposed for durability.
  • As of this writing, both a term-limits bill (H.R. 1074, with a Senate companion, the BATL Act) and a court-expansion bill (H.R. 8647) sit in the House Judiciary Committee, and a constitutional amendment for term limits (Manchin-Welch) has also been introduced. A separate, opposing constitutional amendment — to permanently lock the Court at nine seats — failed in the House on September 2, 2026.

What “Court Packing” Actually Means

“Court packing” gets used loosely, so it’s worth being precise. It does not mean a president filling ordinary vacancies as they occur — that’s just normal appointment power, exercised by every president since Washington. Court packing specifically means changing the number of seats on the Court, through ordinary legislation, in order to change its ideological balance without waiting for a vacancy.

This is different from “packing” the lower federal courts, which happens whenever Congress creates new judgeships (something it has done routinely and on a bipartisan basis, including as recently as the JUDGES Act of 2024) — a distinction explored in depth here, since politicians who call Supreme Court expansion “unconstitutional” often vote for circuit and district court expansion in the same term.

What Term Limits Actually Mean

The dominant term-limits proposal is an 18-year, staggered, non-renewable term for each justice, with a new appointment coming up every two years — meaning every single-term president gets two nominations and every two-term president gets four, regardless of when a justice happens to die or choose to retire. After 18 years of active service, a justice would take “senior status”: they’d step down from regular Supreme Court duties but could still sit on lower federal courts or fill in during an unexpected vacancy, similar to how senior status already works for other federal judges today.

The goal is to remove two specific incentives that currently distort the confirmation process: the temptation for justices to time their retirement to a friendly president, and the enormous stakes attached to any single vacancy, which has turned confirmation fights into some of the most bitter events in American politics.

The Current Bills in Congress

Term limits, by statute: H.R. 1074, the Supreme Court Term Limits and Regular Appointments Act of 2025, introduced by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) on February 6, 2025, would establish staggered 18-year terms and a mandatory nomination every two years, with the Senate’s confirmation window capped at 120 days before the nomination is deemed confirmed. It remains in the House Judiciary Committee with no further action as of this writing.

Term limits, by constitutional amendment: In December 2024, Senators Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Peter Welch (D-VT) introduced a joint resolution proposing a constitutional amendment establishing the same 18-year, non-renewable terms — but doing it through Article V amendment rather than ordinary statute, and explicitly not applying it to any sitting justice. Welch himself acknowledged the proposal “won’t go anywhere this year,” and a constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of both chambers plus ratification by three-quarters of the states, a bar essentially no modern structural reform has cleared.

Court expansion: H.R. 8647, introduced by Rep. Al Green (D-TX) on May 4, 2026, would expand the Court from nine justices to thirteen. It replaces the earlier Judiciary Act of 2023, which expired without action at the end of the 118th Congress. Like H.R. 1074, it sits in the House Judiciary Committee with no scheduled vote.

Term limits, Senate companion: Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Alex Padilla (D-CA) have introduced the Supreme Court Biennial Appointments and Term Limits (BATL) Act, the Senate counterpart to H.R. 1074, requiring a new nomination in the first and third year of each presidential term.

The opposite proposal — locking the Court at nine: On September 2, 2026, the House voted on a Republican-sponsored constitutional amendment that would have gone the other direction entirely: permanently fixing the Court’s size at nine justices, foreclosing expansion by any future Congress. It failed 212–206, well short of the two-thirds majority a constitutional amendment requires. Nearly every Democrat voted against it — not because they favor expansion outright, but because, as House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin argued, the proposal would have permanently surrendered Congress’s own Article III authority to set the Court’s composition. Only Rep. Don Davis (D-NC) voted for it.

None of these bills has a realistic path through the current Congress. They matter as markers of where the debate stands and as the vehicles most likely to be revived if the political math changes.

Are Either of These Actually Constitutional?

Court expansion is the easier question. The Constitution doesn’t specify a number of justices at all — Article III leaves the size of the Court entirely to Congress. That’s exactly why it has changed seven times already: six members under the Judiciary Act of 1789, seven in 1807, nine in 1837, ten in 1863, back to seven in 1866, and nine again in 1869, where it has stood ever since. Congress can change that number by ordinary statute, the same way it did every one of those times — no amendment required, with one settled limit: Congress cannot use a reduction in seats to remove a sitting justice, since Article III tenure “during good Behaviour” protects justices already on the bench. Whether expansion is wise is a separate, much more contested question, covered below.

Term limits are more genuinely disputed. Article III gives federal judges tenure “during good Behaviour” — traditionally read as life tenure absent impeachment. A bill like H.R. 1074 tries to thread this needle: justices keep their Article III judicial commission for life (satisfying “good behaviour” tenure), but their assignment to active Supreme Court duty is limited to 18 years, after which they continue serving as a senior federal judge. The Brennan Center has published a detailed constitutional defense of this statutory approach, arguing Congress has long controlled judicial assignments and caseloads without violating tenure protections. Other scholars think this construction is too clever by half and that only a constitutional amendment can reliably establish term limits — which is precisely why the Manchin-Welch amendment exists as a parallel, belt-and-suspenders track.

Term Limits vs. Court Expansion, Side by Side

Term Limits (18-year) Court Expansion
Mechanism Statute (disputed) or constitutional amendment Ordinary statute
Historical precedent None — would be a new structure Seven precedents, 1789–1869
Constitutional certainty Contested; statutory version faces real legal challenge Well-settled; Congress sets the number
Primary goal Regularize appointments, reduce strategic retirement timing Immediately rebalance the Court’s ideological composition
Effect on sitting justices Typically prospective only — doesn’t remove anyone currently seated Immediate — the next Congress and president fill new seats right away
Public support 69–83% across most polling, bipartisan Roughly 50/50, sharply partisan
Main criticism Doesn’t address who’s on the Court today Sets a precedent the other party will use the next time it holds power
Current bill H.R. 1074 (statute); Manchin-Welch (amendment) H.R. 8647

Neither reform is a complete fix on its own — a case made at length here — but they solve different problems on different timelines, which is why they’re so often proposed as a package rather than a choice between them.

What the Polling Actually Shows

This is where the two reforms diverge sharply, and it’s the single most important fact for understanding the politics of Court reform. Term limits poll extraordinarily well and have for years: an Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found 69% support in September 2025; a Fox News poll found 78% support specifically for an 18-year limit; and a Public Religion Research Institute survey found roughly three-quarters of Americans in favor, including 85% of Democrats, 76% of independents, and 67% of Republicans. Support has ranged from 71% to 83% across multiple pollsters going back to 2019 — a rare structural reform with genuine, durable, cross-partisan majorities.

Court expansion polls nowhere near as well. Recent survey data puts opinion at roughly an even 50/50 split, and the divide tracks partisanship far more closely than term-limits support does — Democrats are considerably more favorable than Republicans, largely depending on who currently holds the majority on the Court. Part of the resistance is the argument that expansion invites retaliation: whichever party expands the Court first sets a precedent the other party will use the moment it regains power, an escalation cycle with no natural stopping point. This asymmetry is a major reason reform advocates increasingly emphasize term limits and an enforceable ethics code as the politically achievable core of any reform package, while treating expansion as a more contested, higher-variance option.

How Other Countries Handle This

The United States is an outlier among major democracies on this exact question. Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom all impose mandatory retirement ages — 70, 75, 75, 68, and 70 respectively — on their highest courts. Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court goes further, giving judges fixed, non-renewable 12-year terms. Colombia’s Constitutional Court justices serve a single nine-year term with no reappointment possible at all. Roughly 49 of the 50 U.S. states impose term limits, elections, or mandatory retirement ages on their own highest judges — meaning the lifetime-tenure, no-retirement-age model used by the U.S. Supreme Court is unusual even within the United States itself, let alone internationally.

Court expansion has fewer direct international analogues, since most peer democracies never fixed their court size as rigidly as the U.S. did in 1869 in the first place — many constitutional courts have had their membership set or adjusted by ordinary legislation more recently and less controversially than an American audience might expect.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is court packing unconstitutional? No. Article III doesn’t set a fixed number of Supreme Court seats. Congress has changed the Court’s size seven times by ordinary statute since 1789, most recently in 1869.

Are there currently term limits for Supreme Court justices? No. Sitting justices serve for life under Article III’s “good Behaviour” clause, subject only to impeachment. No term-limits bill has passed Congress.

Is there a single, official “term limits bill”? No — there are two active, separate bills pursuing the same 18-year staggered-term structure: H.R. 1074, the Supreme Court Term Limits and Regular Appointments Act of 2025, in the House, and its Senate counterpart, the Supreme Court Biennial Appointments and Term Limits (BATL) Act from Whitehouse, Booker, Blumenthal, and Padilla. Neither has an official nickname beyond its formal title.

Would term limits apply to the current justices? Under both the leading statutory proposal (H.R. 1074) and the Manchin-Welch constitutional amendment, no — the changes are designed to apply prospectively to future appointments, not to remove anyone currently on the bench.

How many justices has the Supreme Court had throughout history? Six (1789), seven (1807), nine (1837), ten (1863), seven (1866), and nine again (1869), where it has remained for over 150 years.

Why is court expansion less popular than term limits in polling? Court expansion is seen — accurately — as a direct, immediate way to shift the Court’s ideological majority, which makes support for it track partisanship and whichever party currently benefits from the status quo. Term limits are structural and mostly prospective, which is why they draw support across party lines instead.

Where This Fits in the Bigger Reform Picture

Term limits and court expansion are the two most-discussed reforms, but they’re not the only ones on the table. Jurisdiction stripping would let Congress remove certain categories of cases from the Court’s review entirely. Rotating panels would replace the current nine-seat structure with a larger pool of judges who rotate onto Supreme Court cases. A binding, enforceable ethics code addresses the accountability crisis directly rather than the structural one — and our justice-by-justice ethics and recusal records document exactly why that accountability gap matters in practice. And the case for treating these as a package rather than picking one argues that no single fix, on its own, addresses everything currently wrong with the Court.

This page will be updated as bills move, die, or get reintroduced in future Congresses, and as new polling comes in — treat it as the current snapshot rather than a static one.

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