The Supreme Court has proven they are the reactionary force that Republicans have been building for decades. At least now we know. And for all the public dismay about the decision, not enough people are talking about the future. Here are the next steps:

• Abolish the filibuster
• Make women’s rights the law of the land
• Most importantly, expand the Court.

A few biased justices would never have this much power in a larger court.

Bleak Predictions

First, the bad news: it will get much worse. Now that Justice Alito has crushed Roe, Republicans are already aiming for a national abortion ban. After that, they’ll attack marriage rights, LGBTQ+ rights, contraception, ‘miscegenation,’ and most women’s rights. That’s on top of their existing attacks on voting rights, civil rights, and the structures of American democracy. Justice Clarence Thomas has already pointed out the rights and protections he wants to overturn.

The Court’s conservative bias isn’t new. The Court has been attacking civil rights since conservatives gained a simple majority. They moderated their deepest desires, pretending they were less biased. Now that Republicans have their supermajority, they’re unconstrained. This is about power. The Court battered the separation of church and state and established Evangelical Christianity as the de facto American religion. They overrode the well-known meaning of the Second Amendment to create an individual right to arms. “Originalism” was a lie; That decision would have appalled the Founding Fathers.

And they’ve only started.

The Fragile Power Structure

The Supreme Court cabal of six fringe conservatives are many things, but they aren’t idiots. They understand that their judicial supermajority is temporary and tenuous. Their power depends on keeping the minority Republican party in control. It’s why the conservatives reliably rule against democratic principles like equal rights and majority rule. If the American majority regains power, the conservative conspiracy won’t stay in authority for long.

The six conservative justices understand their time is short. Don’t expect them to dawdle.

What Needs to Happen

So what? That’s the past. What happens in the future? I don’t know, of course, but here’s one path.

To stop that dystopian possibility, we need to expand the court structurally. If we don’t, this conservative conspiracy will tear out the underpinnings of liberal democracy. Bias doesn’t stop.

Here’s what needs to happen:

• Win a workable majority in the Senate. This is the first and biggest obstacle, and it will be hard.
  • Republicans are comfortable monkeywrenching the Democratic administration because nobody ever ties their disasters back to the Republican doorsteps.
  • The GOP allowed giant monopolies and oligopolies to flourish. The quiet quid pro quo is that these corporations will support Republican politicians and their goals. These gigantic multinational corporations control our news media, social media, marketplaces, communication networks, and most aspects of modern life.
  • Republicans control most state governments, even when Democrats win significantly more votes. They’ve built that many distortions into the electoral system. They’ve used that power to build a Republican advantage into our electoral structure.
• The next Democratic majority in the Senate must end the filibuster. This is essential, and it’s also good law. The filibuster was always an unintended accident. Otherwise, Republicans can filibuster everything else. Ending the filibuster is necessary.
• We can only restore our rights to abortion, contraception, marriage, and the rest, by enacting federal laws. Our politicians have to pass them.
• Expand the Court. The MAGA wing in this Supreme Court will override or frustrate every progressive effort. They understand their power’s fragile basis and won’t give it up easily.

Expand the Court

There are a few proposals for reforming this monstrosity of a Court, but most aren’t practical. The most effective and workable choice is to expand the court beyond nine. The Constitution doesn’t care. It’s just a legislative change. And it’s hardly unprecedented.

Look at the 13 federal circuit courts. (Federal Circuit Courts sit above the District Courts and just below the Supreme Court.) They range in size, from six on the First Circuit to twenty-nine on the Ninth Circuit.

Introduction To The Federal Court System, US Department of Justice.

Most Circuit Courts have a lot of judges because they’re busy places. With more justices, they can split up the caseload. The initial review is assign to a randomly assigned panel of three justices. When you can’t predict which judges you’ll get, political calculations get harder. The Supreme Court, though, is tiny, and can only accept a tiny percentage of the cases that petition for appeal. How does that make sense? It’s a fairly odd decision for such a big country.

End the Court Rigging

Why do we keep the Supreme Court so small? I think it’s because that makes it easier to pack. I don’t know if that’s true generally, but a small Supreme Court was been essential to this scheme. Republicans rigged this court by stealing just three nominations. They had to work single-mindedly on it for decades, but they managed.

But if we expanded the court to 17 justices, or 23, 39, whatever, this court-packing nonsense would fall apart. As Elie Mystal suggested, even getting 23 Republican judges to agree on anything would be hard enough. You’d never get them to agree to the wholesale partisan judicial rewriting we’re living through.

I’m also fond of expanding the talent pool. Stop insisting that new nominees can only graduate from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton law schools. Please God don’t send us one more nominee from Georgetown Prep. They don’t all have to be ivy league graduates, white-shoe lawyers, sitting judges, or even lawyers. We’ve already put former Presidents on the Court. Imagine a sitting justice with a social worker’s knowledge, or a small-business owner. Wouldn’t that be valuable?

Make the Supreme Court and its justices representative of America. We should see brown, black, and Asian justices, with half of them women. Include people from different economic backgrounds.

There are other options. Term limits would help, but we’d have to amend the Constitution for that. A binding code of ethics sounds nice, but who would have the power to enforce it? Expand the Court first.

What We Need to Do

Our end goal has to be to rebuild a rational Supreme Court that resists corruption. For that, we need to ask every politician running for office these questions:

1. Will you vote to end the filibuster?
2. Will you vote for a national law to protect women’s rights? LGBTQ rights? Civil Rights? Voting Rights?
3. Will you vote to expand the Court?

Those are the critical questions during this 2022 election cycle. With the MAGA party pushing for a new Republican autocracy, we might not get a second chance.