Bill Kristol, once among the most prominent voices in the Republican Party, is now endorsing the same Supreme Court expansion scheme that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called a recipe for partisan destruction. The former Weekly Standard founder reposted a call from his Bulwark colleague Jonathan Last arguing that expanding the high court is "no different from redistricting in California and Virginia", and insisted Democrats must meet "force with force" as the "only road to preserving liberal democracy."
It is a remarkable turn. The man who helped shape mainstream conservatism for a generation now stands shoulder to shoulder with Democratic strategist James Carville, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and a Harvard professor who openly admits the goal is to ensure Republicans "will never win another election."
Jonathan Turley, the George Washington University law professor and Fox News contributor, laid out the case against this coalition in a recent opinion piece, calling it a "ruthless" campaign to remake the judiciary for partisan advantage. What makes the effort worth examining closely is not just who supports it, but how openly its backers admit the purpose, and how squarely their plan contradicts the warnings of the very liberal icon they once claimed to revere.
Carville has not been subtle. The veteran strategist declared that if Democrats win the presidency and both chambers of Congress, they should act immediately and without public debate. His words:
"If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F--- it. Eat our dust. Don't run on it. Don't talk about it. Just do it."
That language, "don't run on it, don't talk about it, just do it", is not the vocabulary of democratic deliberation. It is the vocabulary of a power grab designed to avoid public scrutiny. Carville wants four new seats filled before voters have time to object.
The strategist has been consistent on this point. As Newsmax reported, Carville also called for adding Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. as states, moves that would almost certainly deliver four new reliably Democratic Senate seats and additional House members. He framed all of it as necessary to "save democracy," the all-purpose justification that has become a hallmark of progressive institutional overreach.
Carville told his podcast audience that the public "has lost faith in an entire branch of government" and that adding four justices would be the fastest way to restore balance and trust, as the New York Post reported. He also said he would support carving out the filibuster to make expansion possible, removing the very procedural safeguard that has historically protected the Senate minority from exactly this kind of steamroller.
The Washington Examiner noted that Carville's rhetoric has escalated. He moved from suggesting Democrats "may" need to pack the court to flatly demanding it, a shift the Examiner described as evidence that even establishment Democrats now support weakening institutional restraints to lock in political advantage.
Kristol's endorsement of court packing deserves particular attention. He founded the Weekly Standard and spent decades as a leading conservative intellectual. Now, as editor-in-chief of The Bulwark, he has repositioned himself as a critic of the Republican Party, and, increasingly, as a cheerleader for structural changes that would entrench Democratic power.
His colleague Jonathan Last wrote the argument Kristol amplified on social media. Last called court expansion "a proportionate response to Republican attempts to degrade liberal democracy and move America toward a post-liberal order." That framing treats the current conservative Supreme Court majority, seated through the ordinary constitutional process of presidential nomination and Senate confirmation, as an illegitimate threat requiring emergency countermeasures.
The Supreme Court faces a series of high-stakes decisions on birthright citizenship, agency power, and election law. Those cases are precisely the kind of rulings that motivate the court-packing movement. When the court rules in ways progressives dislike, the answer is not to win elections and appoint different justices through the existing process. The answer, for Kristol and his allies, is to change the size of the court itself.
Kristol praised governors Gavin Newsom and Abigail Spanberger for what he called "ruthless" leadership in response to Republican gerrymandering, holding them up as models for the kind of bare-knuckle approach he wants applied to the judiciary. The word "ruthless" keeps surfacing in this coalition's language. It is not accidental.
The most devastating rebuttal of the court-packing push comes not from any Republican, but from the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal icon whose image adorns mugs, T-shirts, and progressive fundraising emails to this day.
Ginsburg spoke out against court packing in terms that could not be clearer:
"If anything would make the court look partisan, it would be that, one side saying, 'When we're in power, we're going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.'"
She warned that expansion would "destroy the continuity and cohesion of the court." That is not a conservative talking point. It is the considered judgment of one of the most consequential liberal justices in modern American history.
The fact that Carville, Kristol, Holder, and their allies are now pursuing the very plan Ginsburg condemned tells you everything about the seriousness of their commitment to institutional integrity. They invoke democracy when it suits them and discard it, along with the warnings of their own heroes, when it doesn't.
As Chief Justice Roberts has warned, personal attacks on judges and threats to the judiciary have been escalating. Court packing is the institutional version of that same impulse: if you cannot persuade the court, overwhelm it.
What makes this moment different from earlier flirtations with court expansion is how openly the proponents state the partisan objective. Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out an agenda years ago that included structural changes designed to ensure Republicans "will never win another election." He acknowledged that "the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described", which is precisely why packing the court is the necessary first step in the sequence.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder put the strategy in equally blunt terms. He described the effort as "talking about the acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028." Not the pursuit of justice. Not the protection of rights. The acquisition of power.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has demanded the court be packed. Comedian Margaret Cho declared "this week" that Democrats need someone "feral" and "bloodthirsty." The rhetoric has moved well past policy disagreement into something more corrosive, a willingness to tear down the structure of the judiciary because the current majority rules in ways the left dislikes.
Turley noted that during the 1960s and 1970s, when a series of liberal majorities rewrote major areas of constitutional law, there was "no movement to pack the court." Conservatives disagreed with many of those rulings, sometimes bitterly. But they did not respond by demanding that the court be resized to produce different outcomes. They worked within the system, winning elections, nominating justices, and making their case over decades.
The current push for control of Supreme Court seats reflects a fundamentally different philosophy. It treats the judiciary not as an independent branch but as a policy lever to be adjusted whenever the political winds shift.
Turley himself has written an academic piece proposing a form of court expansion, but his version would take "almost two decades" to implement, a gradual process designed to insulate the change from any single president's partisan interests. That approach, whatever its merits, bears no resemblance to Carville's "day one" blitz.
The difference matters. A decades-long expansion removes the partisan incentive. A day-one expansion maximizes it. Carville's plan is not court reform. It is court capture.
Turley, who has testified more than 50 times before Congress and served as counsel in notable cases over the past two decades, frames the stakes in historical terms. His forthcoming book, "Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution," is set for release on February 3, 2026, timed to the 250th anniversary of the Republic. He invokes Benjamin Franklin's famous reminder that Americans have a republic "if we can keep it."
The question raised by the ongoing speculation about Supreme Court vacancies and the left's open campaign to reshape the bench is whether the constitutional order can survive a political class that treats institutional norms as obstacles rather than safeguards.
Court packing is not a new idea. Franklin Roosevelt tried it in 1937 and failed, rebuked by members of his own party who understood the danger. What is new is the breadth of the coalition now endorsing it, from progressive senators to former attorneys general to a man who once edited the most influential conservative magazine in America.
Kristol's migration from the right to the court-packing left is not just a personal story. It is a data point about what happens when opposition to a political figure becomes so consuming that it overrides every principle the opponent once held. The man who championed judicial restraint and constitutional originalism now endorses the most aggressive form of judicial manipulation available, and calls it the defense of democracy.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw through that logic before it became fashionable. The people now ignoring her warning are the same ones who spent years putting her face on their bumper stickers.
When the people who claim to be saving the system are the ones proposing to blow it up on day one, the system's real defenders are the ones who say no, and mean it.