Democrats running for president in 2028 are openly promising to pack the Supreme Court.
And one legal scholar just called out exactly what they’re really after.
Jonathan Turley went on Fox News and said something about their plan that every American needs to hear.
Pete Buttigieg Offers Up the Supreme Court to a Crowd
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stepped before a crowd at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition recently and told them what they wanted to hear. He called the current Supreme Court “rogue” and floated expanding it to 13 seats, saying, “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that there have to be nine Supreme Court justices. That one doesn’t even take a constitutional amendment. It just takes a readiness to set up a court that fits this country. We could have 13 seats matching the district structure of the federal judiciary, but also a process that makes it less partisan.”
Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, wasn’t buying a word of it. Turley called Buttigieg out for “pandering to the mob,” and pointed out a basic factual error in Buttigieg’s pitch. “He went before an audience and had to offer them something, so he offered them up the United States Supreme Court, perhaps the single most important institution in this country’s constitutional system,” Turley said. “He’s wrong, this wouldn’t reflect the district court system. I think he’s referring to the circuit courts, the fact that there are 13 of them, but that’s the extent of that analysis.”
Buttigieg didn’t come up with this idea on his own. He’s borrowing a page from a playbook that’s been circulating in left-wing academic circles for years. Harvard law professor Michael Klarman laid it out plainly — the goal of packing the court is to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” Klarman even acknowledged that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described,” which is precisely why packing it first is the priority.
They’re Telling You Exactly What They Want
Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder has been equally blunt. Holder explained the whole plan in a podcast interview, saying Democrats are “talking about the acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.”
That’s not a policy argument. That’s a confession.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat who would become Speaker of the House if Democrats retake the chamber, has already declared the Supreme Court “illegitimate” following its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which held that using race in redistricting is unconstitutional. Jeffries told Meidas Touch that “in the new Congress, we’re going to have to do something about this Supreme Court.” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) renewed her own call to pack the court, complaining it was rendering decisions against “widely held public opinion” — which is, of course, exactly what an independent judiciary is supposed to do.
Turley didn’t mince words about what’s really going on. After Fox News anchor John Roberts played a series of clips of prominent Democrats attacking the Court, Turley laid it out directly: “There’s a difference between expanding the court gradually, and what these Democrats are talking about, which is packing the court, adding four liberal justices to flip the result of cases so that they can re-institute, for example, racial gerrymandering, where the courts literally group people by race, something that the Supreme Court finally said is blatantly unconstitutional. Or to get through the federal wealth tax, which is also unconstitutional in my view. This whole list of items that the Democrats want to do to guarantee power require them to take this hostile move against the court. And these are people who are showing that they are politicians who can’t think beyond the next election, let alone the next generation.”
Worth noting: the Supreme Court has ruled against the Trump administration on multiple key issues. The left isn’t angry because the Court is a rubber stamp for Republicans. They’re angry because it won’t rubber stamp them.
What This Is Really About
Turley tied it directly to the nation’s 250th anniversary, drawing on his recent New York Times bestselling book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. “What is really troubling here, and I go into this in my book, Rage and the Republic, is that at our 250th anniversary, pundits and professors are calling to trash the Constitution or make radical changes,” he said. “And as I discuss in the book, you know, they openly talk about the need to guarantee, once they retake power, never to lose it again.”
Let that sink in. These aren’t people making a constitutional argument. They’re people who lost power, don’t like the Court’s rulings, and want to manufacture a permanent majority by loading the bench with four new justices hand-picked to deliver predetermined outcomes. Packing the Supreme Court wouldn’t reform anything. It would turn the nation’s highest court into a Democrat rubber stamp, insulated from voters and accountable to no one.
And Buttigieg knows his math doesn’t hold up. Turley noted the former Transportation Secretary appears to be referring to the 13 circuit courts — not district courts — but even that rationale falls apart under any serious scrutiny. The pitch isn’t designed to survive scrutiny. It’s designed to survive a primary.
Democratic strategist James Carville was perhaps the most honest of all about the strategy. He said the number of Supreme Court justices should go from nine to 13, then added: “Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”
Just do it. That’s the plan. Win power, pack the court before anyone can stop you, then use that court to lock in everything else — statehood for new Democrat-leaning states, a federal wealth tax, racial gerrymandering restored. The whole agenda that keeps failing at the ballot box gets laundered through nine — well, thirteen — unelected justices.
Benjamin Franklin famously warned that Americans had been given a republic, if they could keep it. Turley has been sounding that alarm in his writing and on television for months. The question is whether enough Americans are paying attention before 2028 to understand what’s actually at stake.
But it’s hard to miss when they’re saying it out loud.
Sources: Mediaite, jonathanturley.org, Fox News, The Hill, The Federalist, Washington Exclusive