Democrats have hounded Clarence Thomas since 1991, and come January their new majorities get the gavels to finish the job.

Their activist friends are already passing around the collection plate.

And Jamie Raskin’s Senate partner just let slip what the two of them do every month.

Two Democrat Gavels Share One Standing Appointment

US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) laid out the whole scheme for a Democrat crowd in Des Moines back in August, and hardly anybody outside the room noticed.

He told the audience that he and US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) had already teamed up on a plan to investigate the Supreme Court and subpoena its justices once the next Congress convened.

“We are already meeting monthly to plan,” Whitehouse said.

Then he walked everybody through the mechanics. A Republican minority could filibuster a Senate subpoena, he explained, but it “cannot block a Jamie Raskin House subpoena.”

Read that line twice. A sitting senator mapped out a detour around his own chamber’s rules so Democrats could drag members of a coequal branch of government in front of a House committee.

The midterms paved the detour. Democrats look headed for at least 54 Senate seats and a sizable House majority. Whitehouse stands to take over the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Raskin sits in line for the gavel on the House side.

Whitehouse didn’t bother hiding the target. “We need to do a lot of investigating,” he told the crowd, adding that “not enough people know the story about how the court got captured by a bunch of creepy right-wing billionaires.”

Raskin sharpened the same knife on CNN in October. “They’re taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in trips all over the world from their billionaire sugar daddies,” he said of the justices.

And Raskin isn’t some investigator who just happens to have a grudge. He supports expanding the Court to 13 justices.

That matters, because House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who looks likely to grab the Speaker’s gavel in January, already handed Raskin the steering wheel. NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Jeffries on Meet the Press in August whether he backed adding justices. He ducked. “What I support is dramatic reform,” Jeffries said, before naming Raskin and the Judiciary Committee Democrats as the people who would decide what that reform looks like.

In the same answer, Jeffries accused “right-wing justices like Thomas and Alito” of conduct he called “ethically questionable at best.”

So the ethics probe and the court-packing push share a chairman, a committee room, and a monthly calendar invite.

Demand Justice Wanted Four New Seats Before Anybody Saw a Yacht

Here’s the part Democrats would love everybody to skip.

In January 2021, the left-wing group Demand Justice handed its activists a guide to “court reform.” The pitch didn’t waste words. “We can restore balance by adding 4 seats to the Supreme Court,” it read. NBC News has described the outfit as pushing court expansion since 2020.

ProPublica didn’t publish its first story on Thomas’ vacations with his longtime friend Harlan Crow until April 2023.

Do the math. The demand for four new seats beat the so-called ethics crisis to market by more than two years. Democrats wrote the closing argument before the trial even started, then went shopping for exhibits.

And the outlet that supplied those exhibits hardly qualifies as a neutral referee. Bay Area billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler bankrolled 93 percent of ProPublica’s budget in 2008, by ProPublica’s own account. Herbert Sandler cut a $2.5 million check to the MoveOn.org Voter Fund in 2004, and the couple put millions into launching the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

Funny how Whitehouse only finds billionaires creepy when they lean right.

Thomas answered the trip stories in April 2023. “Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable,” he said. He described the Crows as among his family’s “dearest friends,” a friendship that stretched back more than a quarter century.

Senate Democrats kept digging for roughly 20 months anyway. Then the Judiciary Committee’s Democrat staff dropped a 93-page report just before Christmas 2024, weeks before Republicans took over the panel. Even CNN conceded the report mostly rehashed trips the public had known about for months. Mark Paoletta, a friend of Thomas, fired back that Democrats “released it the day after Congress left.”

Maybe some Democrats honestly lose sleep over disclosure forms. Plenty of decent people want clear rules for every judge in the country, and that’s a fair thing to want.

But decent reformers don’t book a standing monthly huddle with a congressman who already wants four extra chairs behind the bench.

Democrats Sold Grocery Bills and Delivered a Court Fight

The campaign pitch sounded nothing like this.

In early September, House Republicans forced a vote on a constitutional amendment to lock the Court at nine seats, the number it has held since 1869. The House split 212 to 206, nowhere near the two-thirds the amendment needed. US Representative Don Davis (D-NC) cast the only Democrat vote in favor.

Before that vote, the office of House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) urged Democrats to oppose the amendment, complaining that it did nothing about the “affordability crisis.”

Hold on to that phrase for a second. Democrats told the country the Court could wait because families needed relief at the checkout line.

Then the ballots got counted, and Demand Justice fired off a fundraising email. “Last night, voters showed they’re with us. Court reform isn’t a fringe idea anymore. It’s a winning position,” it read. Fix the Court sent out its own victory-lap appeals.

And voters said something else entirely. Ask ten registered voters what the next Congress should fix first, and AP-NORC’s mid-October survey suggests eight would point to the cost of living. Seven would name the war in Iran, the fight neoconservatives spent months selling to the administration.

Neither answer had anything to do with adding seats to the Supreme Court.

Four New Robes Could Rewrite the Country Without One Amendment

Demand Justice no longer bothers with the polite version. Its website calls for expanding the Court to install “a majority of justices who aren’t bossed by Trump or bought by giant corporations.”

Former Vice President Kamala Harris joined the chorus during the summer of 2026. “We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices,” she said. US Representative Jim Clyburn (D-SC) endorsed 13 seats on Meet the Press. US Representative Al Green (D-TX) has a bill sitting in the hopper to do exactly that.

Raskin opposed the nine-seat amendment by writing that Congress shouldn’t “permanently surrender another one of its constitutional powers.”

Translation: keep the option warm until the White House changes hands.

Democrats can’t capture this Court through the Constitution’s normal appointment process, so they want to manufacture four seats and a party-line majority out of thin air. Call it a hostile takeover with a gavel. A 13-seat bench would come for Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling that ended racial preferences in college admissions, and the April voting rights decision that ended the racial gerrymanders Jeffries still complains about. It would gut New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, the landmark Second Amendment opinion Thomas wrote. Free speech, limits on warrantless spying, a manufactured right to citizenship for illegal aliens, and special legal privileges for gender ideology would all sit on the menu.

President Trump holds the veto pen through January 2029, so no packing bill becomes law before then.

But a subpoena never crosses the Resolute Desk. Hearings, document demands, and selective leaks don’t need a presidential signature. They just need two chairmen who already compare notes every month, and a steady drip of “corruption” headlines to make four new seats sound like a cleanup instead of a heist.

US Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) saw it coming. “They don’t like that the Supreme Court has justices who are dedicated to upholding the Constitution, so they resort to lawfare to justify packing the court with judicial activists who would undermine core tenets of our constitutional republic,” he told the Daily Signal.

Thomas turns 78 and Justice Samuel Alito is 76, and the retirement chatter won’t quit. Alito told Fox News he plans to serve through at least the current term, which wraps up in late June. Thomas, the longest-serving justice on the Court and one of the most consequential originalists in American history, has shown no sign of going anywhere.

That leaves Democrats with a long runway and a clear flight plan. Demand Justice president Josh Orton already filed it.

“We intend to continue building the case for major Supreme Court reform through the 2028 election cycle,” Orton said.

Sources:
The Federalist, “Democrats’ War Against The Supreme Court Is About To Get Even Worse”
The Daily Signal, “‘Retribution and Lawfare’: Democrats Eye Supreme Court Subpoenas and Probes”
Breitbart, “Jeffries Backs SCOTUS ‘Reform,’ Declines to Offer Specifics on Expansion”
NBC News, “House Democrats block constitutional amendment to lock Supreme Court size at 9 justices”
Bloomberg Government, “GOP-Led Effort to Cap Supreme Court Bench Fails in House Vote”
Demand Justice, “Guide to Court Reform” (January 2021) and “Reforming the Courts”
CNN, “Justice Thomas says he was ‘advised’ trips with billionaire did not need to be disclosed at the time”
CNN, “Durbin uses new report to accuse Justices Thomas and Alito of violating disclosure laws”
The Washington Times, Senate Democrats release Supreme Court ethics report (December 2024)
ProPublica, “Herb Sandler, the Man Who Made ProPublica Possible”
The Chronicle of Philanthropy, “Financier Backs Project to Beef Up Investigative Reporting”
Fox News, “Alito reiterates he’s not retiring, is committed through end of current Supreme Court term”
TIPP Insights, “Democrats Eye Judicial Reforms After Taking Control Of Congress”
AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, October 2026 voter survey