U.S. House Republicans on Thursday denounced expanding the Supreme Court, an idea some Democrats support to dilute the court’s conservative majority after years of decisions that have angered liberals.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers at a hearing clashed over the future of the high court following Louisiana v. Callais, a landmark decision gutting the federal Voting Rights Act. 

The ruling cleared the way for GOP-controlled Southern states to eliminate congressional districts held by Black Democrats ahead of the November midterm elections.

Democrats have responded by renewing calls for changing the Supreme Court, including expanding the number of justices beyond the nine currently serving. Thursday’s hearing offered a preview of how Republicans may attack those plans if Democrats retake the House in November and try to advance a court overhaul through the chamber.

“Will the United States Congress side with the idea that we should be more democratic in our third branch, or that our third branch should remain more independent, less if not completely outside” the will of the people at the moment, said Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet.

‘Court packing’

The subcommittee hearing, officially titled “Court Packing: A Threat to the Supreme Court’s Legitimacy,” centered on Republican warnings that adding justices would create a slippery slope with no clear end. Democrats countered that the court is placing democracy at risk.

It’s not clear a bill to expand the court would pass a Democratic-controlled House. No clear consensus exists among Democrats over exactly what changes should be made, and other ideas include term limits for justices, a mandatory ethics code for the court or limiting the kind of cases the court can take. 

Any overhaul would face a steep path to becoming law in the near term because of the Senate filibuster and President Donald Trump’s veto.

But Democrats are broadly furious with the Supreme Court and support is growing for some form of action. 

Former Vice President Kamala Harris last week called for a discussion of Supreme Court reform, including expanding the court. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat set to become speaker if his party retakes the chamber, has said “something” must be done in the next Congress.

“Our nation is now in Jim Crow 2.0,” Rep. Henry “Hank” Johnson, a Georgia Democrat and the subcommittee’s ranking member, said at the hearing.

Ruling that sparked outrage

In Callais, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Louisiana had enacted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander when it drew a second majority-Black congressional district. 

The opinion sharply limits the use of race in redistricting, allowing states for partisan gain to split apart districts where most residents belong to a racial minority group. The Voting Rights Act had previously protected these districts.

Democrats have been outraged by other major decisions as well. 

The Citizens United case in 2010 dramatically expanded the role of corporate money in politics. Dobbs in 2022 ended the federal right to abortion. And in 2024, Trump v. United States gave the president sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office.

“We can either sit back as our Supreme Court continues to act without any restraint or checks and balances, or we can do something about it,” Johnson said.

Republicans say they’ve also lost

Republicans and witnesses called by GOP lawmakers emphasized that the Supreme Court has also ruled against conservatives in a number of high-profile cases. 

For example, Chief Justice John Roberts cast the decisive vote to uphold the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law. The Supreme Court also guaranteed the right to same-sex marriage in 2015 and bolstered employment protections for gay and transgender workers in 2019. 

More recently, the Supreme Court effectively blocked Trump’s deployments of the National Guard into Democratic cities. And in February, the justices struck down Trump’s global tariffs — his signature trade policy.

“We had a terrible tariff decision. They cost our country a fortune,” Trump said Thursday.

Gene Schaerr, a lawyer who has argued in front of the Supreme Court, suggested that if Democrats add justices, Republicans will almost certainly respond.

“Before long the only venue in Washington, D.C., that will be large enough to accommodate the Supreme Court’s conferences, their private conferences, will be the White House ballroom,” Schaerr told the subcommittee.

Merrick Garland nomination

But Republicans have already engaged in court packing, said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. 

When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Senate Republicans led by then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky blocked consideration of Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. After Trump won the 2016 election, the Senate moved swiftly to confirm his nominee, Neil Gorsuch, in early 2017.

Senate Republicans then quickly confirmed Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020 — despite the vacancy occurring much closer to the election than in 2016. Those decisions helped move a 5-4 court at the end of the Obama era to a 6-3 conservative majority.

“So right there we have two seats officially stolen by Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate,” Raskin said.

On Thursday, Republicans cast Democratic attacks on the Supreme Court’s legitimacy as dangerous. The court relies on respect, Missouri Solicitor General Louis Capozzi said, with the norm of an independent judiciary built over time.

“Today, we take it for granted that government officials will follow the Supreme Court’s orders,” said Capozzi, who previously clerked for Gorsuch. “But that could change if politicians interfere with the Supreme Court’s independence.”

After the U.S. Supreme Court severely weakened the federal Voting Rights Act in an April 29 decision, a furious U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries condemned what he called an “illegitimate” conservative majority on the court.

“This isn’t even the Roberts Court,” Jeffries said, referring to Chief Justice John Roberts. “It’s the Trump Court.”

Democrats are renewing their calls to overhaul the Supreme Court in the wake of the court’s decision, which empowers states to gerrymander congressional maps in ways that will break apart districts where a majority of residents are Black, Hispanic or belong to other minority groups. 

The momentous opinion overturned the reasoning behind decades of court cases that relied on the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law born of efforts to stamp out Jim Crow voting laws in the South, to protect these majority-minority districts.

For years, critics of the court, where conservatives enjoy a 6-3 majority, have pushed for changes. Those efforts often center on expanding the size of the court to dilute the influence of the majority or imposing term limits on the justices, though other ideas, like narrowing the kinds of cases the court can consider, have also been discussed.

But the April 29 decision seems to be the last straw for some Democrats and progressives, though they are unlikely to be able to force any of the changes on their wishlist — at least for a long time. 

After rulings in recent years that ended the federal right to an abortion and handed President Donald Trump sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution while in office, they are fed up with a court they view as unmoored from the law and ruling based on politics.

“We cannot protect voting rights, civil rights or the environment as long as we have a Supreme Court majority that is captured by MAGA authoritarians,” Doug Lindner, senior director of judiciary and democracy at the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group, told reporters on Thursday. “We need to take back our Supreme Court.”

Any effort to impose significant changes at the court will encounter stiff Republican opposition. GOP lawmakers have praised the court’s latest decision and some see long-serving Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito as conservative icons. Unless Democrats win 60 seats in the Senate or eliminate the filibuster, Congress is highly unlikely to pass a major overhaul.

Republicans have denounced past proposals to change the court. After President Joe Biden proposed 18-year terms for justices and other changes in July 2024, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the plan “would tilt the balance of power and erode not only the rule of law, but the American people’s faith in our system of justice.”

No action under Biden

Supreme Court reform has long percolated as an issue among Democrats and progressives, but picked up steam during the 2020 presidential primary campaign. 

The court’s ideological makeup had already moved toward conservatives after Justice Anthony Kennedy, often a swing vote on key decisions, retired in 2018 and was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative. Republicans then cemented a firm 6-3 majority on the court in the fall of 2020 after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal, died and was replaced by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Campaigning for president, then-candidate Biden voiced support for a presidential commission that would study court reform. After winning election, Biden named a blue ribbon panel of law professors, former judges and other lawyers, which issued a final report in December 2021.

The commission’s report stopped short of endorsing structural changes. It took no position on expanding the size of the court from nine members, citing “profound disagreement” among commission members over the idea. The commission also adopted no stance on term limits for justices.

The report was essentially put on a shelf — Biden made no serious effort to advance a court overhaul, though he later proposed some reforms after ending his campaign for reelection.

Public opinion dropping

Americans’ view of the Supreme Court has been falling. An August 2025 Pew Research Center survey found 48% of Americans hold a favorable view of the court, a 22-percentage point drop from August 2020.

A survey released in September 2025 by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found 69% support for term limits but only 31% support for expanding the size of the court.

Eric J. Segall, a law professor at Georgia State University and the executive director of the Emmet J. Bondurant Center for Constitutional Law, Practice and Democracy, said past courts would have been responsive to the prospect of legislation, but the current court isn’t swayed by public opinion.

In some cases the court tries to preserve its legitimacy by giving the other side a win, Segall said, but in general the court’s decisions since 2018, when Kennedy retired, can be explained by viewing the court as a subset of the Republican Party.

“This court is defined by the Republican Party,” he said.

Segall has called for dividing the court evenly between conservative and liberal appointees. An evenly-split court would encourage greater compromise among the justices, he contends. He also supports expanding the court and term limits if possible. But he bluntly predicted court reform wouldn’t happen in his lifetime.

“If Democrats have the power to do it, they won’t do it,” Segall said.

Action unlikely, at least in short term

Jeffries, who will likely become U.S. House speaker if Democrats retake the chamber in the November midterm elections, said this week that “everything was on the table” in terms of the Supreme Court.

“In the new Congress, we’re going to have to do something about this Supreme Court,” Jeffries told the MeidasTouch Network.

Rep. John Rose, a Tennessee Republican, said on social media that Jeffries’ comments show that Democrats are preparing to “nuke the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court the second they’re back in power.”

Trump and some Republicans in Congress, convinced Democrats will end the filibuster to pass priorities like Supreme Court reform, want Republicans to end the filibuster first and enact a host of conservative priorities before the party potentially loses control of the Senate following the November elections.

But even if Democrats end the filibuster, the party faces a steep climb to changing the court unless it retakes control of Congress and the White House. That means any major overhaul almost certainly wouldn’t become law until at least 2029.

Trump’s response

Trump has had a turbulent relationship with the court but would be virtually certain to veto legislation remaking it while he remains in office.

While the justices have protected Trump and future presidents from criminal prosecution for actions taken as part of their presidential duties, they struck down his sweeping worldwide tariffs as illegal, dealing a major blow to one of his signature policies. They also refused to hear legal challenges that sought to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss.

Still, Trump scoffed on Thursday at Democratic hopes to remake the court in the future. He accused the party of wanting 21 justices on the court (Democratic-sponsored plans in recent years have called for 13 or 15 justices). He also called Jeffries’ comments a “dangerous statement.”

“Hakeem Jeffries said the Supreme Court is illegitimate,” Trump said Thursday. “That’s a rough statement.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision gutting the federal Voting Rights Act sent Black Democrats in the U.S. House reeling on Wednesday, as they confronted a new reality where Republicans could gerrymander some of them out of office and limit the ability of Black voters to elect candidates in the future.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus vowed to fight the court’s decision. They demanded fresh votes on federal voting rights legislation that has languished for several years and urged voters to turn out in the November election.

But facing a Republican-controlled Congress for at least the rest of the year and a Republican White House for at least the next two-and-a-half years, the prospect of major new voting rights legislation becoming law appears slim in the near term.

“It will pave the way for the greatest reduction in representation for Black and minority voters since the years following Reconstruction,” Rep. Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat, said of the court’s decision, referring to the post-Civil War period in the South.

Republicans could ultimately secure up to 19 U.S. House seats nationally directly because of the Supreme Court’s decision, according to a projection by Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based progressive voting rights group, and the Black Voters Matter Fund, which advocates on behalf of Black voters. 

As of Aug. 4, 2025, Congress included 61 Black members of the House, including two delegates, and five senators, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Racial gerrymander

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana’s congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because it unnecessarily created a second district where a majority of residents are Black.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act had previously limited states from using maps that dilute the voting power of minority citizens. Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court’s three liberal justices, wrote in a dissent that the decision would now allow states to dilute the voting power of minority voters without legal consequences.

Republicans welcomed the decision, with many saying race should play no role in redistricting. President Donald Trump, informed about the ruling by reporters and told that it would help Republicans, exclaimed, “I love it.”

Florida lawmakers approved a new map within hours of the opinion. The proposal, offered by Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this week, seeks to secure four additional House seats for Republicans. DeSantis had invoked the court’s decision, even before it was released, to push lawmakers to pass the new map.

GOP candidates and officials in other states urged state lawmakers to move quickly to redraw maps, even with primary elections approaching. Even if only a small number of states enact fresh gerrymanders this year, the Supreme Court decision will likely trigger another, bigger wave of redistricting over the next two years ahead of the 2028 election.

“The Court rightly acknowledged that the South has made extraordinary progress, and that laws designed for a different era do not reflect the present reality,” Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement.

Rep. Richard Hudson, a North Carolina Republican who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, in a statement said the decision “restores fairness, strengthens confidence in our elections, and ensures every voter is treated equally under the law.”

The Supreme Court in 2019 allowed states to redraw maps for political advantage, ruling that federal courts would no longer adjudicate partisan gerrymandering cases. That previous decision, combined with Wednesday’s opinion, offers states a wide berth to draw maps that limit the voting power of minorities if they’re sold as politically necessary.

Bloody Sunday

Sewell represents a district that includes Selma, where the civil rights activist and future U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., along with other marchers, was beaten by state troopers in 1965 while walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an episode called Bloody Sunday. 

The beatings helped spur Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act later that year — the same law the Supreme Court weakened on Wednesday.

“The court just gave states permission to use partisan gerrymandering as a wholesale excuse to deny Black and minority voters a voice in our democracy,” Sewell said.

In Missouri, the Republican-controlled legislature earlier this year passed a map intended to oust Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat who was Kansas City’s first Black mayor. The state Supreme Court is weighing a legal challenge that could keep the map from taking effect before the November election.

On Wednesday, Cleaver in a statement called the opinion “deeply disrespectful of the generations of African Americans and civil rights advocates who gave their freedom, their blood, and even their lives to make it possible.” 

Obama criticizes ruling

Former President Barack Obama condemned the decision as another example of how a majority of the current Supreme Court seems intent on “abandoning its vital role” in ensuring equal participation in American democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.

“The good news is that such setbacks can be overcome,” Obama said in a statement. “But that will only happen if citizens across the country who cherish our democratic ideals continue to mobilize and vote in record numbers – not just in the upcoming midterms or in high profile races, but in every election and every level.

Several Democrats said Congress should pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a Democratic-sponsored measure that seeks to restore preclearance — a requirement that states with a history of discrimination obtain federal approval before making voting changes. The Supreme Court effectively halted preclearance in 2013.

The House, under Democratic control, passed the legislation in 2021 but it stalled in the Senate. Democrats could likely pass the bill again if they retake the House in November but would face a likely filibuster again in the Senate. Even if they managed to pass the bill, Trump would be virtually certain to veto it.

Rep. Cleo Fields, a Louisiana Democrat whose district was ruled an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, sought to place the court’s decision in a broader, historical context. 

Looking ahead to midterms

Recalling Louisiana’s Jim Crow past, he said the state used to require individuals to recite the Constitution’s preamble before registering to vote.

“If you tell me I’ve got to jump a certain height, I could probably do that. Tell me I’ve got to run a certain distance, I could probably do that, too. But if you tell me I have to be white to serve in Congress from Louisiana, I can’t do nothing about that — I need some help from my government,” Fields said, adding that’s why Congress needs to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the Supreme Court’s conservative majority “illegitimate” and said the opinion was unacceptable but not unexpected. 

While acknowledging the decision represents a setback, America has an opportunity to mount a comeback in the upcoming election, he said.

Jeffries, who is set to become speaker if Democrats retake the House in November, said one of the chamber’s first actions would be to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

“So we can end the era of voter suppression in America once and for all,” Jeffries said.

Jennifer Shutt contributed to this report

National leaders warned the Detroit NAACP of an ongoing attack on democracy during what organizers say is the largest sitdown dinner of its kind in the world Sunday.

Speakers at the 71st annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner, including U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and New York Attorney General Letitia James, said efforts to obtain Michigan ballot data, require proof of citizenship to vote and potentially weaken the Voting Rights Act present a major threat to the rights of Americans.

James received the Ida B. Wells Freedom and Justice Award, which she said she shares with Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel after Nessel pledged to deny the federal government access to Michigan’s ballots from the 2024 presidential election.

“This award’s namesake once said, ‘The way to right wrongs is to light the truth upon them, to shine light in the darkness,’” James said. “AG Nessel is the holder of that light of liberty in Michigan, just as our ancestors grabbed the torch of freedom and used it to light the way forward for all of us.”

Jeffries said the election of President Donald Trump in 2024 “was definitively a setback,” but said that “a setback is nothing more than a setup for a comeback.”

He said 2026 will be the year of the “great American comeback.”

“We’re not here to step back,” Jeffries said. “We’re here to push back at all times and ensure that this country will have a free and fair election in November.”

The Democratic leader – who was introduced by several speakers as the next speaker of the House – said that “when the gavels change hands,” Democrats will pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act “so we can end the era of voter suppression in the United States of America once and for all.”

The theme of this year’s dinner was “Liberty or Oppression – The Choice is Ours.”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said the “choice between liberty and oppression is really one between apathy and action.”

“They don’t want Detroit to have a voice. They can’t defend their record of failure, so they want to rig the game to win. But not on my watch, not on your watch, not on our watch,” Whitmer said. “I know it’s hard to feel energetic right now, but nothing changes if we take a back seat.”

The dinner came one day after a gunman opened fire near the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., reportedly targeting Trump.

Jeffries condemned political violence and thanked law enforcement for protecting the attendees at both events.

“Here in America, we should be able to agree to disagree without ever being disagreeable with each other,” Jeffries said. “At the same time, I can assure you that we will continue to speak truth to power at all times as we navigate our way through the trials, the turbulence and the tribulations of this moment.”

James said political violence “has no place in society,” adding that she has faced threats to her own life.

But she added that she continues to “yearn and pray for a compassionate, civil, competent and inclusive government in Washington, D.C.”

The Detroit NAACP also honored civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, who was the first Black child to attend the formerly whites-only William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.

Jeffries said “our community has always had the ability to imagine a better future here in America and then work hard to bring it about.”

James said Bridges set an example for everyone to follow.

“If a 6-year-old Ruby Bridges can find the courage to walk through an angry, screaming mob just to get to school, so can we,” James said.