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Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., called out the Biden administration on Wednesday for a lack of action taken on the Supreme Court and said they were “completely chicken” on it.
The Lever’s David Sirota asked Whitehouse about what “legitimate” resistance to the court might look like if a Democratic president believed the Supreme Court was “enabling an anti-democratic project.”
“Well, I think it starts with truth telling and I think the chief executive of the United States has the proverbial bully, the bulliest of all pulpits, and should be prepared to make the argument about what has gone wrong with the courts. The Biden administration was highly reluctant to do that. They completely chickened out. Biden set up that lame committee commission on the Supreme Court and then squelched both Judge Gertner and Professor Tribe when they wanted to describe some of the actual problems at the court so that they couldn’t even get that into the report,” Whitehouse said.
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He continued, “The Biden people didn’t want to go there. They were completely chicken about all that. They wanted no part of that. And it — really wasn’t until the very end, in his last speech after he and Harris had both lost that Biden seemed to have at least somewhat awakened to the fact that the Supreme Court had a real integrity problem.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said the Biden administration chickened out on Supreme Court reform during an interview on The Lever on Oct. 14, 2026. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images; Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
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Nancy Gertner and Laurence Tribe served on former President Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. Gertner and Tribe wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post in December 2021, calling for adding more justices to the court after the commission ultimately took no position on adding more justices.
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Gertner and Tribe were two of the 34 members of the commission, and wrote in The Washington Post, “We now believe that Congress must expand the size of the Supreme Court and do so as soon as possible. We did not come to this conclusion lightly.”
Whitehouse has been a proponent of Supreme Court ethics legislation as he has argued that the Court has been captured by “right-wing billionaires and special interests.”
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Former Vice President Kamala Harris called for expanding the Supreme Court during an interview on Wednesday, among other big institutional changes, which included Electoral College reform.
“The work that we can do about winning back the House and the Senate is going to be on a number of things. For example, I believe that we need to expand the Supreme Court. We need more justices on the Supreme Court so that we can have a court that actually reinforces the spirit and principles behind the Constitution of the United States,” Harris told podcast host Keke Palmer on her “Baby, This is Keke Palmer” podcast. “I believe that we should be pushing for what is possible around changing the Electoral College. Right?”
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She also called for pursing statehood for Washington, D.C., as well as Puerto Rico. Her comments come days after her 2024 vice presidential running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, warned of a reckoning among Democrats if the party fails to deliver on structural change and promises should they take back Congress and potentially the presidency in 2028.
“The odds of Democrats changing the composition of the Supreme Court through a constitutional amendment are near zero, while changing it via statutory legislation (such as expanding the number of seats or imposing term limits) would be extraordinarily difficult. It is a pipe dream. A fantasy. It’s nothing more than something to get their base excited about,” Northwestern adjunct law professor Andrew Stoltmann told Digital in a statement.
Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse speaks at a hearing. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
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He continued, “A constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, followed by ratification by three-fourths (38 of 50) of state legislatures. Given the deep divides, politically, this is almost impossible. It’s almost silly for Democrats to be arguing that this is a realistic possibility.”
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Biden’s office did not respond to Digital’s request for comment.
