{"id":456,"date":"2026-07-29T14:09:51","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T14:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=456"},"modified":"2026-07-29T14:09:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T14:09:51","slug":"the-push-to-reduce-the-supreme-courts-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=456","title":{"rendered":"The push to reduce the Supreme Court\u2019s power"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Supreme Court reform is in the spotlight this summer after a contentious term in which the court limited Congress\u2019 ability to prevent the president from removing the heads of certain federal agencies, weakened a central provision of the Voting Rights Act, and reduced regulations on campaign finance. In response, some Democrats have called for breaking up the conservative supermajority by expanding the size of the court or imposing term limits for justices, contending that such changes will serve the interests of all Americans. Other proposals have focused on jurisdiction stripping, such as in presidential immunity cases, a type of reform that would narrow the type of cases the Supreme Court has the authority to address.<\/p>\n

Read more Gorsuch says Americans must study history, \u2018warts, glories, and all\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

A less talked about suggestion in some circles is perhaps even more radical: ending or limiting the Supreme Court\u2019s power of judicial review. As most folks who follow the court are well aware, judicial review was (at least formally) established more than 200 years ago in 1803\u2019s Marbury v. Madison<\/em>, in which the Marshall court held that it had the authority to declare laws unconstitutional. Ever since, the power of judicial review has served as a bedrock of the court\u2019s work. (By comparison, the number of Supreme Court justices has changed multiple times over the past two centuries, as has Congress\u2019 role in determining which cases the court hears.)<\/p>\n

To be fair, many of the most recent calls to undo Marbury<\/em> and end judicial review have been confined to social media. And this approach to reform is, to put it mildly, rather unrealistic: It would likely require a constitutional amendment, or the court to overrule foundational precedent \u2013 and thus willingly surrender a core (if not its core) power.<\/p>\n

Rather than espouse this rather extreme position, legal experts and reform organizations have suggested alternative steps through which Congress could reclaim some of the power to interpret the Constitution that now rests with the courts. Nikolas Bowie, a law professor at Harvard Law School, outlined some of these options during his May 21 before the House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet, calling on lawmakers to end \u201cjudicial supremacy.\u201d \u201c[T]he legitimate role for the Court is to enforce<\/em> federal law against anyone who considers themselves above it, whether that anyone is a corporate executive, a state official, or a president,\u201d Bowie said. \u201cThe role for the Court is not to defy<\/em> federal law by placing themselves above you all\u2014the national representatives of we the people\u2014to whom our Constitution and elections give primary responsibility to determine what our Constitution means.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bowie described such a balance of power as \u201cdemocratic constitutionalism\u201d and highlighted several steps that Congress could take to move the country closer to it, such as introducing a \u201cconsensus rule\u201d that makes it so that the Supreme Court may not strike down a federal law absent \u201ca unanimous or supermajority vote\u201d or by including specific language in new laws that instructs courts on what standard of review to use when interpreting them.<\/p>\n

Citing Bowie\u2019s work with Daphna Renan on potential court reforms, Jesse Wegman, a senior fellow in the Office of the President at the Brennan Center, explored the possibility of imposing a consensus requirement in the May 11 edition of his newsletter, Major Questions. Under this requirement, the court would be able to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional only when the vote in favor of such a holding was 7-2, 8-1, or 9-0. \u201cThe argument in favor of a consensus (also called supermajority) requirement is straightforward,\u201d according to Wegman. \u201cCertain decisions involve matters of sufficient gravity that they demand a higher bar be cleared before they are made.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wegman compared this hypothetical consensus rule to the high bars that are already in place in other areas of the law. For example, amendments cannot be made to the Constitution without first being \u201capproved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states.\u201d \u201cThe point of a consensus requirement is not to prevent the Court from deciding constitutional questions,\u201d Wegman argued, \u201cbut to make the justices work harder if they are going to strike down a law written and enacted by the people\u2019s elected representatives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Trump urges SCOTUS to overturn $83.3 million defamation verdict<\/a><\/p>\n

The idea of limiting \u201cjudicial supremacy\u201d recently came up in a separate place: the Democratic Socialists of America\u2019s new platform, released in mid-July. The platform, which outlines the organization\u2019s general goals, calls for replacing \u201cthe President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.\u201d Such a change, according to the DSA, would enable \u201cthe working class to govern.\u201d (As the Washington Examiner noted in its coverage of the platform, overhauling the executive and judicial branches as we know them would require a constitutional amendment.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps because these discussions of ways to limit the Supreme Court\u2019s power are unlikely to lead to congressional action anytime soon, Jay Willis, in a recent column for Slate, instructed readers not to wait for a cue from lawmakers before rejecting judicial supremacy, or the idea that the Constitution means what the Supreme Court says it means. Highlighting law professor Larry Kramer\u2019s work on \u201cpopular constitutionalism,\u201d Willis contended that the Constitution\u2019s framers were \u201ccomfortable with\u201d everyday Americans being engaged in the work of defining and applying the Constitution and suggested that court reform can arise from such popular engagement. (Other legal scholars have contended that at least some founders embraced departmentalism, \u201cthe theory that each branch, or department, of the government has an equal and independent authority to interpret the Constitution for purposes of guiding its own actions,\u201d but that\u2019s a debate for another day.)<\/p>\n

But what does this approach actually entail? After all, as Willis noted, \u201cthe methods by which normal people can have a voice in the Constitution\u2019s meaning are less obvious than the methods by which, say, Justice Brett Kavanaugh can do it.\u201d At its base, according to Willis, \u201cpopular constitutionalism\u201d involves regular Americans reading the Constitution, thinking about what it means, and then sharing their conclusions with others, whether in \u201ca blog or a letter to the editor\u201d or social media post. Such popular engagement with the Constitution, in Willis\u2019 view, would limit the impact of a harmful Supreme Court ruling, because many more people would be engaged in the work of explaining why the court\u2019s decision was wrong and calling on Congress to take action in response.<\/p>\n

As these and other calls for reducing the Supreme Court\u2019s power circulate, some conservative legal thinkers and publications have contended that efforts to change the high court will ultimately \u201cwreck\u201d it by making the law less stable and urged critics to respond to rulings with which they disagree with tailored legislative action, rather than broad reform bills which they believe would generate chaos on the court. For example, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called on Democrats who disagreed with the court\u2019s Voting Rights Act ruling to \u201cargue for a bill to limit how, or how often, states draw House maps\u201d rather than to \u201cblow up the Supreme Court.\u201d<\/p>\n

With election season heating up, the debate over Supreme Court reform will likely grow even louder alongside arguments over the nature of the Supreme Court\u2019s role in our democracy.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump administration appears not to have asked Supreme Court to rehear birthright citizenship case<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Supreme Court reform is in the spotlight this summer after a contentious term in which the court limited Congress\u2019 ability to prevent the president from removing the heads of certain federal agencies, weakened a central provision of the Voting Rights Act, and reduced regulations on campaign finance. 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