Supreme Court

Is Court Packing Inevitable If Democrats Retake Congress and the White House?

Plus: a few words about The Odyssey

Damon Root | 7.21.2026 7:00 AM

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(Illustration: Midjourney)

After his election in 2020, President Joe Biden faced enormous pressure from progressive activists who wanted him to expand the U.S. Supreme Court by packing it with a supermajority of new liberal justices who would be ready, willing, and able to override the Court's conservative majority.

Yet Biden consistently resisted such pressure. Why? Perhaps it was because Biden agreed with liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said it "was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court" in 1937, and it would be an equally bad idea to try again. "If anything would make the Court look partisan," Ginsburg said, "it would be that—one side saying, 'When we're in power, we're going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.'"

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