Democrats are losing their minds. And they are willing to do something terribly drastic.
Now Kamala Harris just pushed to completely gut the Supreme Court.
A Brainstorm With No Bad Ideas — And Several Terrible Ones
Kamala Harris has found her midterm message. After months of conspicuous silence, the former vice president emerged this week with a wide-ranging call to action delivered to the left-wing nonprofit Emerge — and it suggests that what she has been doing with her time since November is not soul-searching, but grievance-cataloguing.
On a call with Emerge, Harris called on Democrats to “invite ideas” for Supreme Court expansion, push for statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., reform or eliminate the Electoral College, and launch what she described as a brainstorm with “no bad idea” off the table. She framed the moment with a battle-cry directness that her 2024 presidential campaign never quite found.
“We’ve got to neutralize this red state cheating,” Harris said on the call. “There’s a brutality at play on the other side, and a ruthlessness. And we need to play to win.”
She also accused the Supreme Court of “back-dooring racism through politics” in its *Louisiana v. Callais* redistricting ruling, claiming that the decision to limit race-based district drawing was “intentionally about trying to suppress the voice of the people.”
It is a political strategy built entirely on the premise that the problem with American democracy is that Republicans keep winning — and the solution is to reconstruct the institutions through which they win until Democrats prevail.
Johnson Provides The Correct Diagnosis
House Speaker Mike Johnson drew on a phrase that, once heard, is difficult to forget. He called Harris an “institutional arsonist” — and proceeded to make the case with enough precision to land the label as something more than a talking point.
“It’s a dangerous thing, a dangerous gambit,” Johnson said. “You don’t just blow up the system when you lose.”
He continued: “For the former vice president of the United States and a candidate for president to suggest that you should pack the Supreme Court or destroy these institutions because they lost is I just think outrageous.”
Conservative Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina was equally direct: “That’s why we can’t let her become president. People rejected her before; they’ll reject her again.”
The criticism is warranted on the merits. Court-packing — adding justices to the Supreme Court to produce politically favorable outcomes — is not a democratic reform. It is the political equivalent of moving the goalposts mid-game and declaring victory. Every time a party proposes it, the party out of power knows they can do the same the next time they hold a trifecta. The institutional damage is permanent, and the precedent is irreversible. The Electoral College proposal is similarly consequential: abolishing it would effectively hand presidential elections to the five or six most populous states indefinitely. The smaller states that currently have meaningful voices in presidential elections — including most of the swing states that have determined every recent election — would become afterthoughts in a national popular vote framework.
Democrats Themselves Are Lukewarm
What is notable about Harris’s call is that even some in her own party declined to match her energy. Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado offered a notably measured response that amounted to a polite redirect.
“I think that’s putting the cart before the horse,” Crow told Fox News. “Right now I’m focusing on lowering costs, health care, ending a runaway war that’s costing Americans tens of billions of dollars. Those are the things that my constituents are talking to me about.”
The contrast is instructive. Crow is focused on the kitchen-table issues that the Democratic Party lost ground on in 2024. Harris is focused on restructuring the constitutional framework that produced outcomes she didn’t like. The party that ran on “saving democracy” is now proposing to overhaul the Supreme Court, eliminate the Electoral College, and add two new states to the Senate — not because these changes represent sound governance, but because they would, if implemented, make it harder for Republicans to win.
Republicans, meanwhile, are winning the redistricting battle cleanly. The *Callais* ruling is enabling states from Georgia to South Carolina to Tennessee to redraw maps in ways that could produce a dozen or more additional Republican House seats before November. Harris’s response to that structural disadvantage is to demand that Democrats be given new institutional tools to overcome it. Speaker Johnson’s response is to keep doing what Republicans did to get here: win elections, confirm judges, and build majorities the old-fashioned way.
