politics

'We've Got To Get Creative About Power'

Crushing the Supreme Court's far-right majority is the only path forward.

Democrats and Republicans exude learned helplessness in wildly different ways.

Republicans can't govern for shit. That's their thing, really, reinforcing the self-perpetuating belief that government is incapable of solving problems big and small, that all issues past and present should be solved by our big, beautiful oligarchs and their untaxed fiefdoms. Like a guy who tells his wife he's just not good at washing the dishes or folding the laundry, governing is the GOP's learned helplessness.

Democrats like to govern. That's their thing. They can be pretty damn good at it when they decide to ignore bad-faith right-wing lawmakers and media narratives. That Democrats can't govern federally is due mostly to a Supreme Court designed to block any and all center-left governing efforts.

It's when Democrats have power that their learned helplessness kicks into high fucking gear. They become the slack-jawed husband who convinces himself he simply cannot properly fold shirts in the laundry basket. Our whole lives have been one disastrous lost opportunity after another for elected Dems to punish Republicans by harnessing the necessary political power and will. Fold the fucking shirt, we howled into the void after the 2021 Republican insurrection. Fold it now!

One day – maybe soon, maybe not so soon – elected Democrats in Congress, in state legislatures, and in governor's mansions are going to have to wield power as quickly and bluntly as their constitution-hating Republican opponents. If we are to survive as a constitutional republic – democracy understanders recently downgraded the US from a liberal democracy to an electoral democracy – Democrats are going to have to gain power and use it brutally and without hesitation to re-establish laws and destroy the Republican Party's sources of power: Social media, the U.S. Senate, the electoral college, gerrymandered electoral maps, and, most critically, the Supreme Court.

If not – if Democrats continue to pretend to lack shirt-folding skills – then these liberal politicians can fiddle with kitchen table issues while the wildfire that is fascism consumes everything.

It's A Matter of Winning And Losing

There has, thankfully, been a marked shift over the past half decade in the way prominent Democrats talk about reforming or expanding the Supreme Court. As recently as the 2020 election cycle, Tom Steyer – a billionaire activist, whatever that means – was the only candidate vying for the party's presidential nomination who unequivocally committed to adding seats to the Supreme Court as a rebalancing of the captured institution.

Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker fell in the camp that said we might get around to addressing the Only Thing That Matters. Joe Biden (and Bernie Sanders) notably said no when asked if he would do what it takes to stop John Roberts from ending constitutional governance one ruling at a time. Seating four or six or eight SCOTUS justices should have been a Day One priority for the Biden administration. Ensuring Trump could never again hold power should have been the overriding theme of the entire four years of the Biden White House.

This 2020 reluctance to expanding SCOTUS was before the Roberts Court outlawed abortion in most of the country, stopped the federal government from regulating industry, turned the president into a king, granted the president's personal paramilitary unchecked power, and cleared the way for the return of the Jim Crow South. All it took for Democrats to get onboard the SCOTUS Reform bandwagon was a handful of the most radical, anti-democracy rulings in the history of western democracy. So we have that going for us, which is nice.

Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate candidate from Maine stomping Susan Collins in the polls, has some thoughts on how the United States can survive and overcome a radicalized and virulently anti-democracy Supreme Court (click here for more on where I stand on the Platner Problem). Like some Democratic electeds and candidates, Platner makes sure to draw connections from today's Supreme Court to historical efforts to counter past Supreme Courts acting in belligerent and anti-constitutional ways.

The battle against out-of-control Supreme Courts standing in the way of progress should be talked about as an American tradition embraced by brave, principled leaders who took the exceedingly difficult and politically perilous path to fight back against the Bad Guys. People like simple narratives, and the fight for the heart of SCOTUS offers an easy one, with John Roberts as the face of democratic decline. Platner, for one, seems to get this.

"If we continue to treat this Supreme Court like a functional constitutional body that's acting in good faith, we're going to continue to lose. Because they have become just another political action wing of corporate conservatism in this nation, and we need to treat it as such."

"I'll be honest, one of the reasons I know we have to do this is that we can look to inspiration from our past, to Abraham Lincoln, who ignore the Court for four years," Platner said. "And thank god he did because we might've lost the war to end slavery if he hadn't. We can look to FDR, who threatened to pack the Court even at the anger of his own party. That saved the New Deal programs that allowed us to drag ourselves out of the Depression."

"We've gotta get creative about power," he continued. "And we have to be honest about American history, because if we are not honest about how power has been used in our history, if we continue to insist that power is only derived from the institutions and the norms and the words on the page, we're gonna lose to people who do not give a damn."

Whatever you think of Platner and his body ink and his time as a U.S. soldier and a mercenary and his past use of slurs online, his recent railing against the bad faith of the Roberts Court and his criticism and theories of power mesh well with what needs to be done after the wretched Trump regime is swept away. Platner's call for getting creative with power, I think, will have a big, loud, influential audience in the next couple years as the MAGA project falls to pieces.

Platner's national profile means his advocacy for fixing the Supreme Court is going to get plenty of attention. The same went for Elizabeth Warren – a Platner backer – when she finally came around on adding seats to SCOTUS. It's good and necessary to have prominent voices and fixtures on TV saying loudly and without reservation that drastic measures must be taken if the republic is to survive (Four years into blogging at Bad Faith Times, I realize expanding SCOTUS has been the through-line for all of my analysis of the right's weaponization of bad faith, because without a Supreme Court willing to play that bad-faith game, that toxic and destructive form of politics would fizzle out in a hurry).

A Slate of 2026 Candidates Ready To Get Creative With Power

Warren and Platner aren't nearly the only Democrats pushing for an immediate fix to our emergency Roberts Court problem though. There's a group of upstart candidates for the 2026 election cycle who have made Supreme Court expansion a centerpiece of their pro-democracy reform platform.

Courage For Democracy candidates, who hold the (not-so) whacky belief that democracy does not defend itself and is not the natural state of human society, have forcefully come out for SCOTUS expansion as they challenge elected stodgy, do-nothing Democrats who have done their best to ignore our lighting quick slide into competitive authoritarianism, where opposition figures can and will be arrested for angering regime officials with spicy social media posts.

Candidates who have joined the Courage for Democracy coalition over the past year are steadfast in their (correct and unassailable) position that national progressive efforts are dead on arrival without a reformed SCOTUS. Eighty-seven percent of the group's candidates support Court expansion – or Court packing, as it's sometimes called – while 4 percent oppose it and 9 percent did not answer. Courage for Democracy's platform includes myriad ways in which political and institutional corruption must be addressed. This, of course, is linked directly to fixing a Supreme Court that is among the most corrupt institutional bodies in the history of western democracy. One issue cannot be addressed without the other.

The Big Stuff – climate collapse, taxes, the wealth gap, abortion rights – are without a pulse as long as the Roberts Court remains intact. Alex Rikleen, my longtime online buddy and a U.S. Senate candidate in Massachusetts, has been refreshingly clear-eyed on how things have to be if basic constitutional democracy is going to be restored after the Trump regime is swept away.

"Democrats who promise policy initiatives, but don’t discuss court reform, are living in a land of make believe," Rikleen told me. "The notion that any of Medicare-for-all, or an overhaul of labor protections, or social media or AI regulations would get through this version of the Supreme Court is like that Jonathan Frakes meme: it’s pure fiction."

Courage for Democracy candidates – seven of whom recently moved on to the 2026 general election – appear to mean business in ways that you just don't see among all but a few congressional Democrats today. The group's candidates "have pledged to file articles of impeachment for tyranny, treason, and obstruction of justice on Day One of their term, acting together to hold this administration accountable."

Obstruction of justice? Yes please. Tyranny? More please. Treason? Do not threaten me with a good time.

Reading though the platforms of these Courage for Democracy candidates, I'm struck by their willingness to "get creative with power," a missing ingredient – maybe the only ingredient that matters – in how Democrats have harnessed their majorities over the past couple decades. These folks are not married to stale norms. They're not afraid to make Republicans angry if that's what it takes to tear out the roots of authoritarianism.

There wasn't much of a constituency for a a group like Courage for Democracy during the first Trump term, in my extremely anecdotal blogger opinion. There certainly wasn't a big audience for these kind of fiercely pro-democracy candidates during the Biden years, as we returned to brunch and did our best to convince each other that the first Trump administration was but an annoying fascist hiccup that would soon be forgotten. The mission had been completed. The hiccups would soon stop.

Now there is a massive and energized and mad-as-shit constituency for this kind of no-holds-barred approach to accountability and reform. About half of Americans say the president is a traitor to the United States. Eight in ten self-identified Democrats and nearly half of independents say Trump has "definitely" committed crimes against the country.

They're right, of course, and they're desperate for representatives finally willing to act like there is an unchecked mob boss running the federal government. Creativity with power is the only path forward for breaking such a man and those enabling his crime spree. That starts and ends with a completely reformed and expanded Supreme Court. I know milquetoast institutionalist Democrats wish there were another way. There is not.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social