Kamala Harris is back, and she has a new cause: stopping the President of the United States from exercising one of his most basic constitutional powers.
The former vice president posted on X promoting a New York Times article about a liberal organization mounting a multimillion-dollar effort to oppose potential Trump Supreme Court appointees. Harris pushed people to contribute, framing the stakes in language that tells you everything about where the Democratic Party's head is right now:
"We must be clear eyed about what is at stake with the Supreme Court right now. We cannot allow Donald Trump to hand pick one, if not two, additional justices. The nation's highest court must be stopped from becoming even more beholden to him."
According to Fox News, the organization behind the effort is Demand Justice, the same group that made him infamous for its campaign to push him to resign. Its president, Josh Orton, said the project would cost $3 million to start and $15 million more if vacancies occurred. The group has pointed to the possible retirements of Justices Clarence Thomas, 77, and Samuel Alito, 76, as the trigger points.
So the play is simple: raise a war chest now, and deploy it the moment a seat opens.
What Harris describes as protecting the Court's independence is, in practice, an organized effort to prevent a duly elected president from filling vacancies on the bench. The Constitution doesn't grant former vice presidents veto power over judicial nominations. It grants that authority to the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate. Harris lost the election. The Senate confirmed that outcome. None of that seems to matter.
The language in her post deserves a closer look. She says the Court must be "stopped from becoming even more beholden" to Trump. This is a sitting constitutional body she's describing as a vassal state. Conservative justices have, in fact, routinely ruled against the administration on major cases. The Court is not beholden to any president. That's the point of lifetime appointments. But acknowledging judicial independence would undermine the fundraising pitch, so independence gets recast as capture.
This is the feedback loop the left has perfected. Declare an institution illegitimate. Raise money from the alarm. Use the money to delegitimize the institution further. Repeat.
If the obstruction campaign sounds aggressive, it's the moderate wing of what Democrats actually want. The real goal, stated openly by some of their most prominent voices, is court packing.
Democratic strategist James Carville laid it out on his podcast with the confidence of a man who has confused prediction with prophecy:
"A Democrat is going to be elected in 2028. You know that. I know that. The Democratic president is going to announce a special transition advisory committee on the reform of the Supreme Court."
"They're going to recommend that the number of Supreme Court justices go from nine to 13. That's going to happen, people."
From nine to 13. Not because the caseload demands it. Not because the Constitution requires it. Because the current Court doesn't rule the way Democrats want. That's the entire rationale, stripped of every euphemism.
Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman was even more explicit about the endgame. He laid out a progressive agenda and then conceded that "the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described." His solution wasn't to craft better legislation or win the argument on constitutional grounds. He predicted that Republicans "will never win another election," so the Court could simply be overwhelmed by expansion.
Notice the assumption baked into every version of this plan: if the Court rules against progressives, the Court is broken. If voters elect Republicans, the system is broken. The only scenario where democracy is functioning, by this logic, is one where the left wins permanently.
Meanwhile, the only Biden nominee on the Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, has drawn criticism from both conservative and liberal justices for what has been described as lashing out at her colleagues. She appeared on ABC's The View to call her own nomination "historic" and something that "gives a lot of people hope."
Sitting justices don't typically do media tours. They don't play pundit. The Court's legitimacy has always rested partly on its members' willingness to stay above the political noise. When a justice treats a daytime talk show as a platform, it feeds the very politicization that Democrats claim to oppose.
But that's the pattern. Erode the norm, then cite the erosion as proof that reform is needed.
Harris reportedly supports court packing. Demand Justice is raising millions. Carville is promising a 13-justice Court by the next administration. Klarman has already conceded that the legal architecture can't survive progressive ambitions without a packed bench to protect them.
None of this is about judicial independence. It's about judicial control. The left wants a Court that functions as a rubber stamp for policies that can't survive constitutional scrutiny on their own merits. When the Court doesn't comply, the answer isn't better arguments. It's more justices.
The Constitution gives the president the power to nominate. The Senate confirms or rejects. That process has worked for more than two centuries. It worked when Democrats held the White House. It worked when they held the Senate. It only became a crisis when they lost both.
A $15 million campaign to block lawful nominations isn't protecting democracy. It's the most expensive temper tantrum in American politics.