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House Democrats are nuking Republicans’ effort to assuage one of President Donald Trump’s biggest concerns about the future of the federal government.
A vote on a constitutional amendment to cap the number of Supreme Court justices failed on Wednesday afternoon after the vast majority of Democrats voted against it.
Trump has warned for months that he believes Democrats would seek to expand the Supreme Court if they took back control of Congress, something affirmed by top progressives, including former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
House GOP leaders sought to head that off with a proposed amendment led by Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., that would mandate that just nine justices can sit on the high court.
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Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., opted to fast-track the legislation past multiple procedural hurdles in exchange for raising the threshold for passage from a simple majority to two-thirds, a maneuver known as “suspending the rules.” But it failed to clinch that number, even though the majority of House lawmakers supported the amendment.
The U.S. Constitution allows Congress to set the number of seats on the Supreme Court bench, which is currently occupied by eight justices and one chief justice.
However, the Constitution itself does not dictate how many justices can exist. Republicans argued that changing that could make it much harder for a Democrat-led government to pack the court in the future to stack judicial odds in its favor.
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“Here’s the question every American should ask: If a sitting majority can change the size of the Supreme Court the moment it dislikes rulings, what happens to the next time the other side is in power?” Biggs asked Wednesday.
“Once you go down that road, the court stops being an independent check on government power. It becomes another political institution controlled by whoever happens to hold the majority.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., among the progressives calling to increase the number of justices to 13, argued that Congress has changed the number of Supreme Court justices multiple times throughout history and dismissed the current tally as arbitrary.
“MAGA’s proposal is to strip Congress of all authority in the matter, to freeze it and cement it permanently in the constitutional architecture for all time with the suddenly magic number nine,” Raskin said.
“It’s another partisan power grab by MAGA, our colleagues, who fear for the results of the November election as their policies have brought us nothing but war, inflation, corruption, lawlessness and a $40 trillion debt — one quarter of it’s supplied by this presidential administration. So, the MAGA party wants to cement into place a profoundly partisan and lopsided … court that was gerrymandered and engineered by Mitch McConnell.”
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He was referring to former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his critical role in helping secure the current conservative majority on the high court.
Progressives have argued that expanding the court to 13 would mean there is one justice for every federal circuit court.
Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., attacked the left’s push as an effort to seize political power.
“For decades, we have heard calls from those unhappy with the ideological balance of the Supreme Court to pack the court. The alarming rise of such calls should worry all of us, because their objective is not to uphold ethical principles or even to protect individual rights, but rather to consolidate power and intimidate the court,” Harris said.
Later, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., said locking the number at nine would only extend the current conservative majority’s power.
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“I think it would be a grave mistake to dictate how many justices should sit on the Supreme Court in perpetuity, and thereby lock in for a generation or more a right-wing majority, which is engaged in an unprecedented assault on Supreme Court norms and our constitutional order for the past several years,” Scanlon said.
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