U.S. Supreme Court

Former Attorney General Eric Holder said the next Democratic nominee for President should make “reform” of the Supreme Court a major item in their 2028 platform.

Then-President Joe Biden proposed reforms to the Supreme Court in a July 2024 op-ed in the Washington Post, citing the court’s ruling in United States v. Trump that granted immunity from prosecution for a president’s official acts and claiming the reforms, including 18-year terms for Supreme Court justices, were necessary to “strengthen the guardrails of democracy.” Holder said the conservative jurisprudence of the Supreme Court had to be stopped when former Democratic National Committee Chairman Jamie Harrison asked if Democrats should target the court in the next presidential race.

“I think the Supreme Court has to be reformed, potentially, you know, expanded. We cannot simply allow this court to continue to do that which it has done,” Holder responded.

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“They don’t focus on precedent. They focus on personnel and by that, I mean, you know, they think, all right, we’ve got six votes and we can now do things that are inconsistent with precedent, long-term precedents that have been put in place to the detriment of our democracy,” Holder claimed. “To the detriment of fairness, and that means political fairness as well as economic fairness. And so I think, yeah, that should be a part of whoever runs for president, Supreme Court [reform].”

Democrats have decried Supreme Court rulings on abortion, nationwide injunctions, the Second Amendment, restrictions on child sex changes and free expression in recent years.

In the Supreme Court’s term that ended July 1, 2024, in addition to ruling that presidents had immunity from prosecution for official acts, the Supreme Court also overturned what was known as the “Chevron doctrine,” which required courts to defer to interpretations of law by regulatory agencies and ruled that fines imposed by administrative law judges violated the Seventh Amendment.

“At a minimum, I think that anybody who runs for president should say that I am for and will try to implement either by constitutional amendment or if there’s a statutory way to do it, term limits for people who serve on the Supreme Court,” Holder told Harrison. “In my book that I wrote, I said that term limits of 18 years is enough. People shouldn’t be on the Supreme Court for 30, 40 years, become disconnected from the country that they’re supposed to serve. 18 years, it is enough for anybody to serve on Supreme Court and that has huge support, by Republicans, by Democrats, by independents. And so I think at a minimum, that should be a part of any Democratic party platform.”

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