The plan to bring a lawless Supreme Court to heel next month

What happened

AlterNet argues that if Democrats win the House and Senate in the November 3 elections, they should use congressional power to confront the Supreme Court’s 6–3 conservative majority. The proposed agenda includes imposing meaningful ethics rules, investigating judicial conduct, considering court expansion and term limits, and preventing further Trump nominees from receiving automatic confirmation.

The immediate trigger is Justice Samuel Alito’s disclosure to CBS News that he considered retirement earlier this year but decided he could still contribute. Alito denied that Republican control of the Senate influenced his decision. The column nevertheless warns—without establishing—that Alito, Clarence Thomas or John Roberts might retire under favorable political conditions so Trump could nominate younger successors.

The plan is therefore conditional, not scheduled: Democrats must first win congressional majorities, and the article reports no introduced bill, settled leadership program or commitment to act next month.

Power is already allocated

The justices hold lifetime offices, but Congress is not powerless. Senators decide whether nominees advance. Congress controls the judiciary’s appropriations and structure, can conduct oversight and may legislate within constitutional limits. The presidency supplies nominees. These are institutional choices, not weather patterns.

Republicans understood those levers and used them. The column correctly centers the Senate’s refusal to consider Merrick Garland in 2016 and its rapid confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett shortly before the 2020 election. Those outcomes required decisions by Mitch McConnell and Republican senators, not merely the passage of time or the brilliance of conservative strategy.

Democratic agency matters too. The article faults Democratic leaders for failing to answer procedural aggression with comparable institutional resolve. Its strongest example is Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin’s unsuccessful request that Chief Justice John Roberts discuss ethics reform. A request without an enforceable consequence demonstrated the limits of courtesy when the recipient could simply refuse.

Reform is not a hammer until it exists

An ethics code, term limits and additional seats are three different projects with different legal and political obstacles. Grouping them beneath a demand to “bring the Court to heel” substitutes posture for a governing program.

The article does not specify what ethics legislation would require, how it would be enforced, how term limits would be structured or whether Democratic senators would abolish the filibuster to pass contested reforms. Nor does it establish that prospective Democratic majorities support any of these measures. Winning power and exercising it are separate events.

That gap is the central political problem. Democrats cannot restrain judicial power through denunciation. They would need legislation, votes, enforcement mechanisms and leaders willing to accept the resulting conflict.

The column weakens its own indictment

The reporting repeatedly converts suspicion into accusation. It refers to possible retirement benefits as bribes, claims justices answer to wealthy interests and calls Alito’s wife a participant in a coup, but the supplied material does not establish those claims. Alito’s admission that he considered retirement is evidence of retirement planning—not evidence of a payoff or an agreement to manipulate succession.

The discussion of Brett Kavanaugh is similarly overstated. The column says he described Roe v. Wade as “settled law” to Senator Susan Collins and later voted to overturn it. That sequence supports scrutiny of how nominees use precedent language during confirmation. It does not, by itself, establish perjury: proving a lie under oath requires more than showing that a justice later adopted a contrary legal position.

This is not a demand for gentleness toward powerful officials. It is a demand for precision. Unsupported criminal language gives the Court’s defenders an easy diversion from documented decisions, undisclosed benefits, confirmation tactics and the material consequences of rulings.

Spectacle misdirects from machinery

The column’s insults toward justices, Republicans and even Democratic Senator John Fetterman consume space that should be used to identify votes, rules and enforcement choices. Fetterman’s weight and personality have no demonstrated bearing on the Court’s structure. That attack redirects attention from senators who actually control confirmations and legislation.

The election predictions are also presented with more confidence than evidence warrants. The author expects Democrats to win the House and narrowly take the Senate, perhaps by five seats, but supplies no polling or race analysis establishing those outcomes. A forecast is not a governing majority.

Even the Gallup figure—12 percent reporting a great deal of trust in the judicial branch—cannot by itself prove public support for expansion, term limits or a particular ethics regime. Distrust identifies a legitimacy problem; it does not select the remedy.

The systemic error

The larger pattern is that judicial supremacy persists because elected officials alternately exploit it and disclaim responsibility for it. Republicans treated confirmations as a durable exercise of power. Democrats, in the account presented here, too often treated the Court as an institution to petition respectfully after the decisive appointments had already been made.

The answer is neither theatrical rage nor reverence for robes. It is accountable government: name the officials controlling nominations, confirmations, legislation and oversight; state the reform; count the votes; and impose consequences through lawful institutional power.

A court insulated from ordinary elections gains strength when legislators pretend its dominance is inevitable. But a reform campaign built on speculation and unsupported allegations is also an evasion. It replaces the difficult work of governing with the easier performance of fury.

Thanks to Alter Net

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