I went to my college reunion this weekend. It was cold and rainy at a time of the year when it’s supposed to be warm and sunny or at least warm and rainy. So I didn’t stay as long as I’d planned. But in the short time I was there, I had a number of people come up to me and say that I’d brought them around on the idea of Court reform. This was about things I’ve written here in the Editors’ Blog but, interestingly and somewhat surprisingly to me, far more of the comments were about things I’ve said on the podcast. This was of course gratifying to hear personally. But I note it here because it was an example, out in the wild if you will, of the broader pattern: a sea change in ideas, goals and judgments of the Supreme Court and the necessity of reform. I saw it at this elite university reunion. I’m seeing more and more examples of it within the legal academy – at least the beginnings of it. And perhaps most importantly we’re seeing discussion about it from elected members of Congress.
What’s the next step there? One thing I get asked about again and again is what can individual people do? A related question is, how do we clear out the old consultants, or the old foreign policy hands or the old advisors and staffers, etc. etc. That’s inherently challenging.
But there’s something very direct we can do on this issue. It’s not something any of us can do individually on our own. But it’s something we can be a part of. And it has a big, big effect. We’re still a few months out from the 2026 midterms and we’re more than two years out from the 2028 general election (after which comes the first moment when all of this stuff could actually happen). What we can do is be part of establishing litmus tests for elected office as a Democrat. Two critical ones, I would say maybe the most critical are: abolish the filibuster and reform the Court.
“Litmus tests” get a bad name. In American political discourse, they are usually framed as cheap and narrow-minded things that single-issue activists use to constrain or maybe eliminate statesman-like behavior. Think about it for a moment, and I think you’ll see that the phrase is almost always used this way. It’s almost never used as a positive thing. But that’s wrong. What litmus tests do is create clarity, truth in advertising. When you vote for candidate X, you know what you’re getting. They’ve given a clear promise that they support a particular thing and will do, if given the opportunity, a particular thing. If they don’t come through, they can be voted out of office. The promises need to be crisp and clearly framed. Politicians will almost always try to avoid that. They want to retain freedom of action. You’ll see this so often in the Senate when the caucus moves as a pack resisting demands to say clearly what they do and don’t support on critical issues. But when questions or pledges are framed tightly enough that becomes very difficult.
That’s what we can all do. We can use all our avenues of expression, our financial contributions, our voting and generic advocacy to shape and enforce a new set of rules, a new set of assumptions about what Democrats will do when they are in power again. You’ll also need a lot of new people. Some will have to be forced into retirement. There will have to be expectations about new advisors and policy hands. But where we can all make our voices and demands heard is building this set of litmus tests: making it clear that it’s not acceptable to be elected to Congress as a Democrat without supporting abolishing the filibuster and reforming the Supreme Court.