{"id":155070,"date":"2026-06-18T16:18:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T00:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/06\/18\/supreme-court-term-limits-went-from-punchline-to-platform-for-progressives\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T16:18:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T00:18:16","slug":"supreme-court-term-limits-went-from-punchline-to-platform-for-progressives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/06\/18\/supreme-court-term-limits-went-from-punchline-to-platform-for-progressives\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Term Limits Went From Punchline To Platform For Progressives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in 2015, at a Netroots Nation<\/a> panel discussion about how to \u201cchange\u201d the Supreme Court, I asked if progressives should embrace term limits for the justices. The panel blew off the proposal as unimportant<\/a>. Eleven years later, a sitting U.S. Senator \u2014 poised to become the Democratic leader of the Judiciary Committee \u2014 called for Supreme Court term limits from the dais.<\/p>\n

Life tenure comes at you fast.<\/p>\n

Progressives weren\u2019t happy with the Roberts Court of 2015, but back then, the change plan more or less began and ended with electing Hillary Clinton. Back then, term limits would jeopardize Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer \u2014 indeed, Ted Cruz was an advocate of term limits then for exactly that reason \u2014 and no one on the panel seemed to have much appetite for anything that would force them out, even if it would also remove Scalia and Thomas. Then Clinton lost, Trump appointed three justices, and the Roberts Court started taking a sledgehammer to constitutional order. As Court Accountability<\/a> co-founder Alex Aronson explained in a session at this year\u2019s conference, that whiff locked in a conservative majority projected to hold until 2065<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It produces a special kind of bitterness to be vindicated by utter catastrophe.<\/p>\n

The West Wing<\/em>, the cultural debacle that convinced a generation of liberals that it\u2019s totally reasonable for Democrats to appoint Republicans to the Supreme Court, had a line that goes, \u201clet\u2019s forget the fact that you\u2019re coming a little late to the party and embrace the fact that you showed up at all.\u201d It seems progressives have indeed shown up at the term limits party, and have dutifully brought a six-pack and ice.<\/p>\n

Speaking on a panel titled, \u201cConfronting the Roberts Court: Reclaiming the People\u2019s Constitution,\u201d Senator Sheldon Whitehouse laid out three buckets of reform on his agenda: investigate the capture of the courts, impose an enforceable ethics code, and install term limits. He came armed with numbers \u2014 imposing term limits on the Supreme Court polls around two-thirds, a real ethics code in the low seventies \u2014 and noted, almost wistfully, that those figures exist before Democrats at large have bothered to tell the public the story. If Republicans could turn an estate tax that touches three-tenths of one percent of Americans into a winning issue starting from zero, he asked, it\u2019s not hard to imagine what could be accomplished starting with two-thirds of the country already onboard.<\/p>\n

Lisa Graves, author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights<\/a>, walked the room through the Supreme Court\u2019s capture as a documented, minimum-six-hundred-million-dollar project. Roberts selected to \u201cbe a ringer\u201d rather than his preferred analogy as an umpire. The role of Charles Koch quietly pushing to seat both Roberts and Alito back when most people couldn\u2019t pick him out of a lineup. Leonard Leo and Don McGahn executing the picks off a Federalist Society list that may have been cover for a deal cut between the Koch operation and a Trump campaign it had spent the entire primary at war with. <\/p>\n

And they got what they paid for. While the opinions touching on constitutional liberties get the most attention, Ryanne Olsen of the National Association of Consumer Advocates<\/a> explained at an earlier panel moderated by Christine Chen Zinner of the Alliance for Justice<\/a> titled, \u201cTake SCOTUS Back! Why Now and How To Do It,\u201d that this Supreme Court marks the most pro-business Court in a century. She estimates this Supreme Court could shift \u201c$30 billion from corporations into the pockets of Americans every single year,\u201d but for its assault on consumer reforms.<\/p>\n

Alison Gill, Director of Nominations and Democracy at the National Women\u2019s Law Center<\/a>, described the expansion of this operation to lower courts, with Trump\u2019s second term judicial nominations drawing from two pools: conservative activists and personal loyalists. Remember the halcyon days when Trump nominees would just refuse to admit bringing back Jim Crow was unconstitutional?<\/a> They\u2019ve taken that position and added refusing to concede that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and declining to confirm that Trump is, in fact, ineligible to be elected to a third term.<\/p>\n

Harvard Law School\u2019s Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan introduced another possible reform they discuss in the forthcoming Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People<\/a><\/em>. Judicial supremacy is, they argue, a civic consensus unsupported by the law. The Constitution never handed the Court the power to strike down acts of Congress, and explicitly handed Congress the power to regulate the Court. Holding the will of the political branches hostage to an unelected House of Lords subverts the constitutional framework. When the Court decided it could dictate the rules in Dred Scott<\/em>, Lincoln and the abolitionists campaigned on the premise that the Court unconstitutionally usurped the role of the political branches. <\/p>\n

Though not everyone at the conference was on board with term limits, at least the dissenters skew the opposite direction these days. If term limits were a radical proposal 11 years ago, they represent the bare minimum table stakes for 2026.<\/p>\n

In the earlier panel, our former colleague Elie Mystal made the case that he has made for years, that aggressive court expansion is the solution<\/a>. Keeping the packed house in stitches, Mystal hit the expansion high notes: it\u2019s undeniably constitutional and the only reform on the table that can overhaul the complexion of the Court immediately. The risk that expansion sets off a tit-for-tat cycle of compounding expansions that bring us right back to square one \u2014 while further undermining the legitimacy of the Court along the way \u2014 didn\u2019t generate much traction with this crowd. From Mystal\u2019s perspective, if we do land back at this point, what have we really lost? \u201cYou\u2019re losing 6-3 now,\u201d he said, \u201chow is losing 16-13 worse?\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, one way is that entering an escalating expansion war structurally disfavors Democrats, because the odds of achieving the necessary political branch trifecta required favors Republicans, because the Senate is designed to favor GOP-leaning states, this same geographic quirk also gives Republicans an edge in the Electoral College, and ongoing gerrymandering efforts have made the House easier for Republicans too. The odds that an expansion ping pong gets stuck with conservatives holding serve longer than the Democrats make expansion a riskier proposition than the audience seemed interested in hearing. <\/p>\n

Not to mention the role a term limited Court could play in getting at the judicial supremacy problem highlighted by Bowie and Renan. The implicit promise of expansion is that, when the wheel stops on your trifecta, your justices can continue their deadhand influence until the other side can get their own trifecta. It doubles down on the idea of justices as life tenured nobility, when the nation desperately needs the Supreme Court to feel like a responsive democratic institution again<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Speaking of gerrymandering, recent experience with mid-cycle redistricting lends credence to the idea that expansion would spiral. But moreover, it supports the frightening prospect that conservatives will find facially ridiculous<\/a> ways to make sure it only ratchets one way. Once Democratic state governments proved they\u2019d be willing to break with the prevailing Democratic strategy of \u201crolling over\u201d to redistrict themselves, the Supreme Court majority looked at the Voting Rights Act, the hard ceiling on Republican gerrymandering<\/a>, and opened the door for their party to redistrict Black voters into oblivion. Shalela Dowdy, one of the plaintiffs in the Alabama case, explained the short-term goal of organizing and turning out voters to hold onto districts designed to disenfranchise Black voters. Over the longer-term, Stasha Rhodes, founder of Antaeus<\/a>, pointed to a United for Democracy petition<\/a> in the wake of Louisiana v. Callais<\/em> designed to put pressure on Congress to come up with a plan. <\/p>\n

And Supreme Court expansion is clearly a constitutional plan. But if following the Constitution mattered to the majority, we wouldn\u2019t be having this conversation. Would the conservatives muster five votes for the proposition that the failure of FDR\u2019s court packing measure proves that it\u2019s now \u201crooted in the Nation\u2019s history and tradition\u201d that the Supreme Court is capped at 9 justices? That shouldn\u2019t<\/em> work. But would you actually put it past them?<\/p>\n

The justices would definitely balk at a legislative term limits proposal, but Mystal did nod to potentially the most important expansion argument. \u201cFDR was a losing New Deal cases 5 to 4, and then he threatens to pack the Supreme Court, and then, oh, my God, magically, somehow, I don\u2019t know, he starts winning New Deal cases.\u201d Expansion is the threat. It\u2019s the nuclear option that can secure better reforms. This supermajority is not going to provide another \u201cswitch in time that saved nine\u201d on the issues progressives care about, but it might concede to a switch on term limits to stave off the prospect of being joined by 10 new justices.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the best synthesis of this came up outside the panels, when Professor Renan mentioned a proposal floating around \u201cregularized appointments.\u201d Bifurcate the term limits plan into a schedule of a new appointment every two years and an 18-year term. If the Supreme Court strikes down the latter\u2026 well, then they can learn to live with a new colleague every couple of years. A possible best of both worlds approach.<\/p>\n

Eleven years ago the answer was sitting right there, but Democrats thought they had a path to securing long-term dominance at the ballot box. And while they did win at the ballot box, the Electoral College had other ideas. Now, to restore constitutional order, there\u2019s finally serious discussion beyond \u201cwinning the Court\u201d and considering fundamentally changing the nature of the Supreme Court to get out of the business of winning deadhand control in perpetuity. Back in 2015, the panel blew off the idea of term limits, placing its faith in, what it considered \u201cdemocracy.\u201d But this view of democracy was always too narrow. The true small-d democratic solution isn\u2019t about winning elections to control the Court, but about rejecting the whole notion that a single popular election can arbitrarily become a 30-year political cudgel.<\/p>\n

Earlier<\/strong>: The Supreme Court Still Blows But We Have No Idea How To Fix It<\/a>
The Missed Opportunities Haunting The Supreme Court\u2019s Abortion Move<\/a>
Supreme Court Term Limits Still The Only Reform That Matters<\/a>
Supreme Court Term Limits Are The Least Dangerous, Most Necessary Reform On The Menu<\/a>
Broadside Against Supreme Court Term Limits Misses The Mark<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Supreme Court Term Limits Went From Punchline To Platform For Progressives<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Back in 2015, at a Netroots Nation<\/a> panel discussion about how to \u201cchange\u201d the Supreme Court, I asked if progressives should embrace term limits for the justices. The panel blew off the proposal as unimportant<\/a>. Eleven years later, a sitting U.S. Senator \u2014 poised to become the Democratic leader of the Judiciary Committee \u2014 called for Supreme Court term limits from the dais.<\/p>\n

Life tenure comes at you fast.<\/p>\n

Progressives weren\u2019t happy with the Roberts Court of 2015, but back then, the change plan more or less began and ended with electing Hillary Clinton. Back then, term limits would jeopardize Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer \u2014 indeed, Ted Cruz was an advocate of term limits then for exactly that reason \u2014 and no one on the panel seemed to have much appetite for anything that would force them out, even if it would also remove Scalia and Thomas. Then Clinton lost, Trump appointed three justices, and the Roberts Court started taking a sledgehammer to constitutional order. As Court Accountability<\/a> co-founder Alex Aronson explained in a session at this year\u2019s conference, that whiff locked in a conservative majority projected to hold until 2065<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It produces a special kind of bitterness to be vindicated by utter catastrophe.<\/p>\n

The West Wing<\/em>, the cultural debacle that convinced a generation of liberals that it\u2019s totally reasonable for Democrats to appoint Republicans to the Supreme Court, had a line that goes, \u201clet\u2019s forget the fact that you\u2019re coming a little late to the party and embrace the fact that you showed up at all.\u201d It seems progressives have indeed shown up at the term limits party, and have dutifully brought a six-pack and ice.<\/p>\n

Speaking on a panel titled, \u201cConfronting the Roberts Court: Reclaiming the People\u2019s Constitution,\u201d Senator Sheldon Whitehouse laid out three buckets of reform on his agenda: investigate the capture of the courts, impose an enforceable ethics code, and install term limits. He came armed with numbers \u2014 imposing term limits on the Supreme Court polls around two-thirds, a real ethics code in the low seventies \u2014 and noted, almost wistfully, that those figures exist before Democrats at large have bothered to tell the public the story. If Republicans could turn an estate tax that touches three-tenths of one percent of Americans into a winning issue starting from zero, he asked, it\u2019s not hard to imagine what could be accomplished starting with two-thirds of the country already onboard.<\/p>\n

Lisa Graves, author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights<\/a>, walked the room through the Supreme Court\u2019s capture as a documented, minimum-six-hundred-million-dollar project. Roberts selected to \u201cbe a ringer\u201d rather than his preferred analogy as an umpire. The role of Charles Koch quietly pushing to seat both Roberts and Alito back when most people couldn\u2019t pick him out of a lineup. Leonard Leo and Don McGahn executing the picks off a Federalist Society list that may have been cover for a deal cut between the Koch operation and a Trump campaign it had spent the entire primary at war with. <\/p>\n

And they got what they paid for. While the opinions touching on constitutional liberties get the most attention, Ryanne Olsen of the National Association of Consumer Advocates<\/a> explained at an earlier panel moderated by Christine Chen Zinner of the Alliance for Justice<\/a> titled, \u201cTake SCOTUS Back! Why Now and How To Do It,\u201d that this Supreme Court marks the most pro-business Court in a century. She estimates this Supreme Court could shift \u201c$30 billion from corporations into the pockets of Americans every single year,\u201d but for its assault on consumer reforms.<\/p>\n

Alison Gill, Director of Nominations and Democracy at the National Women\u2019s Law Center<\/a>, described the expansion of this operation to lower courts, with Trump\u2019s second term judicial nominations drawing from two pools: conservative activists and personal loyalists. Remember the halcyon days when Trump nominees would just refuse to admit bringing back Jim Crow was unconstitutional?<\/a> They\u2019ve taken that position and added refusing to concede that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and declining to confirm that Trump is, in fact, ineligible to be elected to a third term.<\/p>\n

Harvard Law School\u2019s Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan introduced another possible reform they discuss in the forthcoming Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People<\/a><\/em>. Judicial supremacy is, they argue, a civic consensus unsupported by the law. The Constitution never handed the Court the power to strike down acts of Congress, and explicitly handed Congress the power to regulate the Court. Holding the will of the political branches hostage to an unelected House of Lords subverts the constitutional framework. When the Court decided it could dictate the rules in Dred Scott<\/em>, Lincoln and the abolitionists campaigned on the premise that the Court unconstitutionally usurped the role of the political branches. <\/p>\n

Though not everyone at the conference was on board with term limits, at least the dissenters skew the opposite direction these days. If term limits were a radical proposal 11 years ago, they represent the bare minimum table stakes for 2026.<\/p>\n

In the earlier panel, our former colleague Elie Mystal made the case that he has made for years, that aggressive court expansion is the solution<\/a>. Keeping the packed house in stitches, Mystal hit the expansion high notes: it\u2019s undeniably constitutional and the only reform on the table that can overhaul the complexion of the Court immediately. The risk that expansion sets off a tit-for-tat cycle of compounding expansions that bring us right back to square one \u2014 while further undermining the legitimacy of the Court along the way \u2014 didn\u2019t generate much traction with this crowd. From Mystal\u2019s perspective, if we do land back at this point, what have we really lost? \u201cYou\u2019re losing 6-3 now,\u201d he said, \u201chow is losing 16-13 worse?\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, one way is that entering an escalating expansion war structurally disfavors Democrats, because the odds of achieving the necessary political branch trifecta required favors Republicans, because the Senate is designed to favor GOP-leaning states, this same geographic quirk also gives Republicans an edge in the Electoral College, and ongoing gerrymandering efforts have made the House easier for Republicans too. The odds that an expansion ping pong gets stuck with conservatives holding serve longer than the Democrats make expansion a riskier proposition than the audience seemed interested in hearing. <\/p>\n

Not to mention the role a term limited Court could play in getting at the judicial supremacy problem highlighted by Bowie and Renan. The implicit promise of expansion is that, when the wheel stops on your trifecta, your justices can continue their deadhand influence until the other side can get their own trifecta. It doubles down on the idea of justices as life tenured nobility, when the nation desperately needs the Supreme Court to feel like a responsive democratic institution again<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Speaking of gerrymandering, recent experience with mid-cycle redistricting lends credence to the idea that expansion would spiral. But moreover, it supports the frightening prospect that conservatives will find facially ridiculous<\/a> ways to make sure it only ratchets one way. Once Democratic state governments proved they\u2019d be willing to break with the prevailing Democratic strategy of \u201crolling over\u201d to redistrict themselves, the Supreme Court majority looked at the Voting Rights Act, the hard ceiling on Republican gerrymandering<\/a>, and opened the door for their party to redistrict Black voters into oblivion. Shalela Dowdy, one of the plaintiffs in the Alabama case, explained the short-term goal of organizing and turning out voters to hold onto districts designed to disenfranchise Black voters. Over the longer-term, Stasha Rhodes, founder of Antaeus<\/a>, pointed to a United for Democracy petition<\/a> in the wake of Louisiana v. Callais<\/em> designed to put pressure on Congress to come up with a plan. <\/p>\n

And Supreme Court expansion is clearly a constitutional plan. But if following the Constitution mattered to the majority, we wouldn\u2019t be having this conversation. Would the conservatives muster five votes for the proposition that the failure of FDR\u2019s court packing measure proves that it\u2019s now \u201crooted in the Nation\u2019s history and tradition\u201d that the Supreme Court is capped at 9 justices? That shouldn\u2019t<\/em> work. But would you actually put it past them?<\/p>\n

The justices would definitely balk at a legislative term limits proposal, but Mystal did nod to potentially the most important expansion argument. \u201cFDR was a losing New Deal cases 5 to 4, and then he threatens to pack the Supreme Court, and then, oh, my God, magically, somehow, I don\u2019t know, he starts winning New Deal cases.\u201d Expansion is the threat. It\u2019s the nuclear option that can secure better reforms. This supermajority is not going to provide another \u201cswitch in time that saved nine\u201d on the issues progressives care about, but it might concede to a switch on term limits to stave off the prospect of being joined by 10 new justices.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the best synthesis of this came up outside the panels, when Professor Renan mentioned a proposal floating around \u201cregularized appointments.\u201d Bifurcate the term limits plan into a schedule of a new appointment every two years and an 18-year term. If the Supreme Court strikes down the latter\u2026 well, then they can learn to live with a new colleague every couple of years. A possible best of both worlds approach.<\/p>\n

Eleven years ago the answer was sitting right there, but Democrats thought they had a path to securing long-term dominance at the ballot box. And while they did win at the ballot box, the Electoral College had other ideas. Now, to restore constitutional order, there\u2019s finally serious discussion beyond \u201cwinning the Court\u201d and considering fundamentally changing the nature of the Supreme Court to get out of the business of winning deadhand control in perpetuity. Back in 2015, the panel blew off the idea of term limits, placing its faith in, what it considered \u201cdemocracy.\u201d But this view of democracy was always too narrow. The true small-d democratic solution isn\u2019t about winning elections to control the Court, but about rejecting the whole notion that a single popular election can arbitrarily become a 30-year political cudgel.<\/p>\n

Earlier<\/strong>: The Supreme Court Still Blows But We Have No Idea How To Fix It<\/a>
The Missed Opportunities Haunting The Supreme Court\u2019s Abortion Move<\/a>
Supreme Court Term Limits Still The Only Reform That Matters<\/a>
Supreme Court Term Limits Are The Least Dangerous, Most Necessary Reform On The Menu<\/a>
Broadside Against Supreme Court Term Limits Misses The Mark<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in 2015, at a Netroots Nation panel discussion about how to \u201cchange\u201d the Supreme Court, I asked if progressives should embrace term limits for the justices. The panel blew off the proposal as unimportant. Eleven years later, a sitting U.S. Senator \u2014 poised to become the Democratic leader of the Judiciary Committee \u2014 called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":155071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Headshot-300x200-LkTXV2.jpg?fit=300%2C200&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}