Above the Law: Supreme Court Term Limits Went From Punchline To Platform For Progressives
This excerpt is from a piece that originally ran on June 18, 2026.
Lisa Graves, author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, walked the room through the Supreme Court’s capture as a documented, minimum-six-hundred-million-dollar project. Roberts selected to “be a ringer” rather than his preferred analogy as an umpire. The role of Charles Koch quietly pushing to seat both Roberts and Alito back when most people couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. Leonard Leo and Don McGahn executing the picks off a Federalist Society list that may have been cover for a deal cut between the Koch operation and a Trump campaign it had spent the entire primary at war with.
And they got what they paid for. While the opinions touching on constitutional liberties get the most attention, Ryanne Olsen of the National Association of Consumer Advocates explained at an earlier panel moderated by Christine Chen Zinner of the Alliance for Justice titled, “Take SCOTUS Back! Why Now and How To Do It,” that this Supreme Court marks the most pro-business Court in a century. She estimates this Supreme Court could shift “$30 billion from corporations into the pockets of Americans every single year,” but for its assault on consumer reforms.
Alison Gill, Director of Nominations and Democracy at the National Women’s Law Center, described the expansion of this operation to lower courts, with Trump’s second term judicial nominations drawing from two pools: conservative activists and personal loyalists. Remember the halcyon days when Trump nominees would just refuse to admit bringing back Jim Crow was unconstitutional? They’ve taken that position and added refusing to concede that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and declining to confirm that Trump is, in fact, ineligible to be elected to a third term.
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In the earlier panel, our former colleague Elie Mystal made the case that he has made for years, that aggressive court expansion is the solution. Keeping the packed house in stitches, Mystal hit the expansion high notes: it’s undeniably constitutional and the only reform on the table that can overhaul the complexion of the Court immediately. The risk that expansion sets off a tit-for-tat cycle of compounding expansions that bring us right back to square one — while further undermining the legitimacy of the Court along the way — didn’t generate much traction with this crowd. From Mystal’s perspective, if we do land back at this point, what have we really lost? “You’re losing 6-3 now,” he said, “how is losing 16-13 worse?”
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The justices would definitely balk at a legislative term limits proposal, but Mystal did nod to potentially the most important expansion argument. “FDR was a losing New Deal cases 5 to 4, and then he threatens to pack the Supreme Court, and then, oh, my God, magically, somehow, I don’t know, he starts winning New Deal cases.” Expansion is the threat. It’s the nuclear option that can secure better reforms. This supermajority is not going to provide another “switch in time that saved nine” on the issues progressives care about, but it might concede to a switch on term limits to stave off the prospect of being joined by 10 new justices.