Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) came out firmly against expanding the Supreme Court during a Thursday Senate debate, pushing back on Democrat Troy Jackson after he said he was open to adding justices to a bench he described as “obviously not working,” according to Breitbart News.
The exchange put a sharp, concrete dispute over the court’s structure directly into one of the country’s marquee Senate races, turning an abstract debate about judicial reform into a head-to-head contrast between two candidates with very different views of how the institution should function.
Jackson Backs Ethics Reform, Term Limits, and an Open Door to More Seats
Jackson, the Democrat challenging Collins, framed his position around a set of grievances with the current court, arguing that the justices need stricter ethics rules and term limits before he’d consider structural changes. He accused members of the court of accepting gifts and travel from people who have business before them.
“I understand why we had Supreme Court that was supposed to be lifetime positions, but look, what we have now is something unbelievable,” Jackson said. “I mean, people that don’t have any ethics. People that are taking trips, people are taking you know gifts from people that are going to come before them. I mean, this is not I don’t think what our founding fathers expected whenever they set up you know this system.”
He went on to say that ethics reform should come first, followed by term limits, and that he would not rule out enlarging the court itself.
“And so yeah, I think first and foremost we have to have real ethics reform that’s accountable that you can hold people do. I think that we should have term limits, and I’m not against putting more people on the court because this court obviously is not working,” Jackson said. “It’s working at the pass of the Donald Trump and the billionaire class. I mean, that’s who’s actually funding people like Thomas and Alito.”
The remark about Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito referenced a long-running line of Democratic criticism over undisclosed travel and gifts, an argument that has fueled calls on the left for tighter recusal and disclosure standards. Jackson’s comments appeared to fold that ethics critique into a broader case for remaking the court’s composition.
Collins: The Founders Wanted a Court ‘Insulated From Politics’
Collins answered by putting the court’s independence at the center of her argument, saying the priority should be shielding the judiciary from partisan pressure rather than reshaping its membership. She rejected adding seats as a way to change the court’s ideological balance.
“What we want is a Supreme Court that is insulated from politics,” Collins said. “That was the whole idea of the judicial system, one of the three branches of government, parts of the checks and balances that the founders of this country envisioned. To try to pack the court by increasing the numbers goes completely against the vision of those who wrote the Constitution.”
The senator then pointed to her own record of crossing party lines on judicial nominations, casting it as evidence that the system can work without structural changes.
“I would also point out that I am the only Republican senator who voted for Justice Sotomayor, Justice Jackson, and Justice Kagan,” Collins said. “Those three liberal women justices who were appointed by Democratic presidents, and that’s what I think the founders want. They don’t want the Supreme Court to be like Congress.”
That line served as both a defense of her judicial philosophy and an implicit rebuttal to the charge that her party’s approach to the courts is purely partisan. By citing her votes for Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Elena Kagan, Collins positioned herself as a senator willing to confirm justices nominated by Democratic presidents when she deemed them qualified — a point she used to argue the court doesn’t need to be expanded to achieve balance.
How the Court’s Size Became a Live Political Question
The number of seats on the Supreme Court is not fixed by the Constitution. Congress set the court at six members in 1789, and the size shifted several times over the following decades before lawmakers settled on nine justices in 1869. That history is why proposals to add or subtract seats remain constitutionally permissible — and why they remain politically explosive.
For Collins, the practical question raised by Jackson’s comments is whether Maine voters want a senator who defends the court’s current structure or one open to changing it. Her answer leaned heavily on the idea that the judiciary’s legitimacy depends on being seen as separate from the political branches, and that enlarging the court to achieve a preferred outcome would undermine that separation.
Jackson’s answer leaned on the argument that the court as currently constituted has already been politicized — through the conduct of some of its members and through the influence of wealthy interests he said are backing them. In his telling, ethics reform, term limits, and possibly additional seats are all remedies for a court that has drifted from what the founders intended.
Those two framings collided in a single debate exchange, and they are likely to keep colliding through the rest of the campaign. Collins has built her Senate career on a self-styled independent streak, and her rejection of court-packing fits that brand. Jackson has built his candidacy on a more confrontational posture toward institutions he argues are failing ordinary people, and his openness to expanding the court fits that brand in turn.
The debate did not settle the question so much as sharpen it. Maine voters now have a clear, on-the-record split between a Republican incumbent who says the court’s independence is the whole point of the founders’ design and a Democratic challenger who says the current court is broken enough that adding justices should be on the table.
Neither candidate’s position is novel in national terms — court expansion has been debated on the left since the Trump-era confirmations, while Republicans have almost uniformly opposed it. What the Thursday debate did was put the argument in front of Maine voters in direct, personal terms, with each candidate speaking to the other’s position rather than past it.
Collins’ reference to her votes for three Democratic-appointed justices also served as a reminder of how narrow the Senate’s confirmation math has been in recent years, and of how much weight a single crossover vote can carry. Her argument was effectively that the existing confirmation process, messy as it is, has produced a court with justices from both parties’ presidents — and that expanding the bench would be a departure from that tradition rather than a correction of it.
Jackson’s argument was effectively that the process has produced a court whose members are too comfortable with the interests appearing before them, and that piecemeal ethics fixes won’t be enough on their own. Whether voters accept either framing will be tested at the ballot box.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/10/15/collins-pushes-back-as-jackson-says-hes-open-to-expanding-supreme-court/