The Democratic primary in 2019–20 seemed for a while to be the peak of progressive ideological overreach, one symptom of which was the return of Court-packing, an issue that had fallen off the radar since its decisive rejection in 1937. Joe Biden knew better but played along while kicking the issue down the road — until July 2024, when he was desperate enough for support within his party to back a Court-packing plan under another name, which was duly if more quietly supported by Kamala Harris (who had been openly pro-Court-packing in 2019). With the decisive defeat of Harris and the administration she represented, the recognition that the appointing power would be in the hands of Donald Trump for the next four years, and the likelihood that a 53-seat Republican Senate majority would keep Democrats out of the confirmation-blocking power for two and maybe four years, the campaign to demonize the conservative justices and lay the groundwork for radical attacks on the Court paused with a whimper after the election.

Well, the political campaign for Court-packing may be in hiding, but its advocates are still out there shopping it for the next crop of Democratic politicians, as witnessed by this column in Slate yesterday by Jay Willis, titled “The Past Four Years at the Supreme Court Did Not Need to Be This Way,” arguing that Democrats should have packed the Court under Biden and should be planning ahead to do so in the future (under the euphemism of “court reform”):

Democrats who are dissatisfied with the past four years of the Supreme Court’s handiwork need to learn from their mistakes—to start building popular support for court reform now, so that they can act decisively if and when they are next in power.. . . It is true that court expansion does not poll as well as it did five years ago. But being a politician occasionally requires actual leadership, which means working to persuade voters of the merits of a position, rather than reflexively hewing to public opinion at any given moment. In the meantime, the court has provided plenty of fodder for Democrats interested in reopening the debate: Before Trump took office, the court’s approval rating hovered in the 40s, and often dipped when the justices made headlines for one ignominious reason or another. After Dobbs, for example, the court’s approval rating plunged to 38 percent in one poll, down from 66 percent two years earlier. If recent history is any indication, Democrats do not have to do much to make the court a villain, because the court is very adept at doing that all by itself. . . . Democratic politicians need to start laying the groundwork for court reform now, by making the case to voters that the current court poses an existential threat to everything they care about. Again, this should not be especially difficult: A study published in 2024 estimated that without expansion, Republicans would maintain control of the Court until 2065. If you are a Democrat who understands what four straight decades of Barrett majority opinions would look like, and you are still too afraid to challenge the status quo, why are you in politics in the first place?

No bad idea is ever truly dead. Now, while there are still some institutionally minded Democrats worried about Trump doing something extreme in a future collision with the courts, Republicans in Congress should bring up the “Keep Nine” amendment for a vote.