Conservative gambit to lock Supreme Court at nine justices falters in House

Republicans championed a constitutional amendment they said would block Democrats from “court-packing” should they retake a legislative majority.WASHINGTON (CN) — The House on Wednesday afternoon torpedoed a longshot effort by Republicans to advance a constitutional amendment capping the number of justices who can serve at one time on the U.S. Supreme Court.The push to amend the country’s founding document — though unlikely to come to fruition — came as GOP lawmakers in Congress have amped their assault on Democrats ahead of the midterm elections, claiming they will, among other things, move to pack the high court with politically friendly jurists.Republicans, spearheaded by Arizona Representative Andy Biggs, have said Congress and the states should affirm that the Supreme Court be composed of exactly nine justices to get ahead of what some lawmakers have framed as a Democratic interest in court-packing at One First Street.“It’s planned, it’s orchestrated — the Democrats’ systematic attack on the independence of the court has been going on now for several years,” said Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, during remarks on the House floor Wednesday.Pointing to legislation championed by some Democrats that would add four new seats to the Supreme Court, Jordan argued the intention of such an effort was to reverse the bench’s current conservative majority by tacking on new justices to be appointed by a Democratic president.Other Republicans claimed “court-packing” would be used to reverse recent controversial rulings handed down by the conservative-leaning high court.“Their solution to losing these constitutional legal arguments isn’t to seek to change the law, but to attack the Supreme Court and pack it with judicial activists,” said Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman.Democrats, meanwhile, questioned the timing of Republican interest in locking down the composition of the Supreme Court, arguing they were angling to cement the bench’s political slant. President Donald Trump has appointed three of the six conservative justices at the court, which has recently handed him several high-profile victories such as the controversial presidential immunity ruling.“We all can argue about what the Supreme Court does, but nobody yet has made a single satisfactory argument about why we should freeze — for the first time in American history — the number of justices at nine, when it’s always been up to the representatives of the people in the House and Senate,” said Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.Republicans on Wednesday brought the proposed constitutional amendment up under a procedural measure that would have allowed it to skip a committee vote. But successfully pulling that lever would have been an uphill battle, requiring a two-thirds majority in the House. The amendment ultimately failed in a 211-206 vote, far short of that threshold.Even if Republicans had managed to get their amendment through the House, it’s exceedingly unlikely they would have been able to ratify such a change to the Constitution. The proposed update to the U.S. founding document would need to clear the Senate on another two-thirds majority and also be approved by three-fourths of state governments.Still, GOP lawmakers have for years tried to lock in the Supreme Court bench for fear of Democratic “court-packing” should they retake the majority. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley last year unveiled a similar constitutional amendment alongside Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who sponsored the same bill in 2023.Democrats for years have bemoaned Trump’s outsized influence on the high court and questioned the political independence of some of its justices. Their concerns were supercharged in 2023 amid explosive revelations that Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose high-value gifts lavished on him by conservative benefactors. Similar reports later emerged about Justice Samuel Alito, who accepted hospitality from other right-leaning political figures including at least one who would later have business before the court.The scrutiny — and congressional oversight — spurred the Supreme Court to adopt a code of ethical conduct signed by all nine sitting justices. But critics of the framework, the first of its kind for the high court, pointed out that it lacks an enforcement mechanism.Democrats at the time introduced a raft of legislation aimed at addressing what they called an ethics crisis at the Supreme Court, including a bill that would have added additional seats to the bench. But none of the proposed measures made any significant progress before Trump won reelection in 2024.Republicans, for their part, have long said the ethical scrutiny on the justices was another part of a Democratic scheme to discredit the bench’s conservative majority.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads