Pete Buttigieg says the Supreme Court has turned into a “nakedly partisan institution” — and he wants Congress to add six seats to it. The former transportation secretary made the argument Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, telling host Kristen Welker the goal is structural change rather than a simple numbers game.
“It has become a nakedly partisan institution,” Buttigieg said, per The Daily Wire. “And I want to be clear. The idea is not to just add justices for its own sake. The idea is to reform the institution, to make it less partisan.”
The proposal would lift the bench from nine justices to 15 — a larger expansion than Buttigieg has previously floated. The specific math matters here: six new seats, presumably filled by presidents and senates likely to confirm justices aligned with the party that created them, would give Democrats a comfortable working majority on a court that has swung sharply to the right over the past two decades. Rucho v. Common Cause
From 13 to 15
Sunday’s comments mark an evolution in Buttigieg’s public position rather than a debut. As far back as July, he told Fox News that public confidence in the court had collapsed to what he described as the lowest point in its history, and pitched a package of fixes including term limits for justices and a “balanced bench” selection process meant to insulate appointments from raw political pressure.
At that time, Buttigieg said he favored expanding the court from nine to 13 — a number he said should match the count of what he called “the number of districts” in the federal system. That arithmetic drew pushback from critics, who pointed out that the federal judiciary is divided into 94 judicial districts. The number 13 corresponds to the appellate circuits, not the district courts. The distinction is mostly technical, but it became a talking point in conservative outlets after his July remarks.
His new figure of six additional seats — bringing the total to 15 — instead tracks an academic framework first advanced by law professors Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman. Under that proposal, the bench would be split evenly between justices associated with each party, with a final bloc chosen by consensus. The idea is to force both sides into a bargaining posture rather than letting a single party’s appointees command a durable majority. Buttigieg’s description on Sunday appeared to echo that consensus-driven design, though he did not offer a detailed blueprint for how such a selection process would work in practice.
In a July post on X, Buttigieg framed court reform as part of a broader reformist agenda: “Fix Congress. Reform the Supreme Court. End money in politics. We cannot be afraid to fight for big reforms.” He added that kitchen-table issues — gas prices, mortgage affordability — would only be solvable with more accountability in government.
The politics of court expansion
Court expansion remains one of the most charged ideas in Democratic politics, and Buttigieg’s willingness to keep escalating the number is notable for a figure widely viewed as a potential 2028 presidential contender. He has not said whether expanding the court would be a policy priority if he were elected, leaving open the question of whether Sunday’s comments represent a firm commitment or a broader critique of the institution’s direction.
The practical obstacles are steep. Adding seats to the Supreme Court requires an act of Congress, which means Democratic leaders would need unified control of the House, a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, or a decision to abolish the filibuster for judicial structure legislation — all of which have eluded the party in recent cycles. Even some Democrats have been wary of court-packing, warning it would invite retaliation the next time Republicans hold power. Republicans, for their part, have generally treated the idea as a nonstarter, and the party’s judicial appointments during the Trump years are the very thing that prompted progressive calls for structural reform in the first place.
The current court’s 6-3 conservative majority was cemented by three Trump-appointed justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — a sequence that reshaped the institution’s jurisprudence on abortion, firearms, administrative law, and environmental regulation. The Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022 became a flashpoint that turbocharged Democratic interest in court reform, though the party’s leadership has largely kept expansion at arm’s length while pursuing ethics legislation and term-limit proposals with narrower political exposure.
Buttigieg’s framing on Sunday fits that broader progressive case: that the court’s legitimacy has been compromised by its composition and the manner in which its members were confirmed. Whether that argument translates into votes — or into a concrete 2028 platform — is a separate question, and one Buttigieg has so far declined to answer.
A crowded reform conversation
Buttigieg is not alone in pushing structural changes. Progressive legal scholars and advocacy groups have spent years building out proposals that go beyond simple seat-count additions — term limits, rotating panels, jurisdiction stripping, and ethics enforcement among them. The Epps-Sitaraman framework, in particular, has become a reference point for reformers who want a design that does not simply replicate the current partisan dynamic in reverse.
What remains unclear after Sunday is how far Buttigieg intends to take the idea. He doubled down on the diagnosis, sharpened the remedy, and named a specific number. But he stopped short of committing to the fight if he ever holds the levers of power to wage it — leaving the proposal at this stage as a statement of principle from a politician whose national profile is still being defined.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/buttigieg-proposes-court-packing-to-fix-supreme-court-he-calls-nakedly-partisan