It’s no secret that the Supreme Court has become an extension of our partisan politics over the past decade. The decisions handed down in the 2026 session prove just how broken the court has become and how unrepresentative it is of the views of the American people. Reactions show how little confidence the public has in its fairness.
Future Democratic majorities in Congress — perhaps starting as soon as January — should make repairing the court and reforming the judicial branch a priority to make sure it does not continue to operate as a partisan and retrograde institution.
One need look no further than the court’s recent decisions for evidence of its partisanship and dysfunction.
President Trump’s handpicked court continued to gut the Voting Rights Act, greenlighting Republican gerrymandering to tip the scales of this upcoming and future elections, and undermining a half century of precedent and the hard-fought battles of the civil rights era. After professing their abiding respect for precedent during confirmation hearings, a partisan majority of the court has no trouble striking down any precedent when it disfavors GOP control of Congress.
Trump’s justices have allowed federal immigration agents to arrest and detain individuals, without the requisite standard of cause, based on their apparent ethnicity, perceived jobs or spoken language. This nod to the conservative agenda to roll back civil rights also required the disparagement of any precedents to the contrary.
The court gave Trump the power to fire heads of independent agencies, including federal trade commissioners, clearing the way for him to assert political influence on additional independent government bodies intended by Congress to be insulated from such pressures. This required overturning more than nine decades of precedent. Only when it came to the Federal Reserve was the court willing to sustain the independence of one of these bodies, and then only because wealthy financial interests (and the economy more generally) collided with the personal whim of the president.
A full third of the court is now so extreme that it almost allowed Trump to overturn the Constitution with an executive order, which attempted to claim he alone had power to do away with birthright citizenship.
These attacks on the Constitution and decades of established American law have not taken place in a vacuum. Their backdrop is a festering culture of corruption in our courts — with undisclosed luxury gifts and glaring conflicts of interest, and members of our judiciary refusing to recuse themselves from cases tied directly to their benefactors’ financial or political advantage, or their own.
It is not surprising then that the American public has abandoned reverence for those who are meant to be our independent arbiters of the law. Chief Justice John Roberts claimed that his court would merely “call balls and strikes.” But decisions to overturn Roe vs. Wade and dismantle the Voting Rights Act have led more than half of Americans to disapprove of how the court is doing its job, with almost half of Americans believing that the court “is ruling on President Trump’s policies based on ideology, rather than the law.” Who can blame them?
Democrats should unite around a simple and deeply popular agenda to fix the court.
We must enact term limits for Supreme Court justices to promote predictability and stop institution-defeating gamesmanship around depriving presidents of hearings and votes on their nominees.
We need to expand the number of justices sitting on the court to reflect the expanded size of our nation and to prevent this court — now otherwise fixed for a generation in its steadfast partisanship — from further destroying the hard-fought system of rights the American people have come to rely on.
And we must create an enforceable code of ethics, bringing this court under the same set of rules of accountability as other leaders privileged to be in public service.
I’ve drafted legislation to build on these three core tenets, to ensure transparency and ethical standards across the federal judicial system.
After being called out for repeated conflicts of interest, the Supreme Court established a toothless code of conduct in November 2023 with no external body to enforce it. Under these unenforced and unenforceable guidelines, justices act as their own ethical arbiters with no accountability.
To rectify this, I’ve proposed extending the conflict of interest statute that already applies to executive branch employees to include federal judges and justices, preventing them from participating in cases relating to their own financial interests.
So long as judges and justices know where their investments lie — and therefore where they may profit — it is fair to question the impartiality of their decisions. The law I propose, called the Justice Is Blind Act, would require judges, justices and their immediate family to put their financial assets into a blind trust. Members of Congress should be required to do the same, if not divest their assets entirely.
Lastly, we need to bring much-needed transparency to our judiciary. By expanding the Freedom of Information Act to the judiciary, we would create an explicit right of public access to administrative records so the American people and the press can access judicial complaints, investigation records, meeting minutes and more.
Passing these reforms will be difficult in a Congress where Republicans have become rubber stamps for the president’s priorities, but it’s important for Democrats to push for legislation that tells the country what we stand for, and what we’re willing to do when we flip majorities in Congress and take back the White House.
If Justice Samuel Alito retires soon — as some have speculated he will — that may open the door for Trump to appoint a fourth Supreme Court justice — and yet another political ally poised to advance the president’s agenda rather than the rule of law or justice. This should be a warning to all Americans of how much is at stake if we don’t act to fix this system.
These proposals would help restore balance and credibility to the court. It has been packed, and it should be unpacked. It has become an agent of partisan and cultural warfare, and it should become a neutral arbiter of the law. It has shredded precedent to achieve political objectives, and it should respect precedent once more. It has become beholden to wealthy financial interests, and it must disentangle itself from the personal economic benefit of its decisions.
The American people’s trust in the judicial system might be battered, but when Democrats control Congress again, they will have the opportunity to rebuild that trust and should not miss what could be the last best chance to restore some measure of integrity to the courts.
Adam Schiff represents California in the U.S. Senate.
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