Democratic strategist James Carville has some bold proposals for Democrats in the Trump era.
On Wednesday’s episode of his Politics War Room podcast, Carville said that Democrats “are right when they say this democracy is really imperfect.”
With that diagnosis in mind, Carville unleashed a flood of recommendations for Democrats if they win back both chambers of Congress and the presidency in 2028—a prospect that Carville said is “certainly not impossible.”
“They are just going to have to unilaterally add Puerto Rico and [the] District of Columbia [as] states … They’re just going to have to do it,” Carville said. “And they may have to expand the [Supreme Court] to 13 members.”
While the latter proposal could be enacted via legislation passed through Congress, it has struggled to gain traction outside of progressive circles within the party.
In 2021, a group of four Democrats introduced a bill to expand the court, which has varied in size from five to 10 justices over time but has remained stable at nine since the mid-1800s.
Granting statehood to Puerto Rico and D.C. would be a steeper climb: In addition to passing the House and Senate with two-thirds majorities, statehood bills would need to be ratified by 38 states.
The closest that either territory has come to statehood came in 1979, when the D.C. Voting Rights Amendment passed Congress but was only ratified by 16 states.
In addition to these long-shot policy proposals, Carville also argued that Democrats should seek to enact a law regulating congressional redistricting efforts as Republicans in Texas mount a controversial attempt to gerrymander five Democratic-controlled districts.
The long-term prescription for Democrats, who have looked to Carville as an election-whisperer since he masterminded former President Bill Clinton’s shocking 1992 presidential win, comes a few weeks after Carville referred to the party as a “cracked-out clown car” in a New York Times op-ed.
Carville didn’t discuss the feasibility of his proposals, but he emphasized that the current political moment demands that Democrats embrace ideas that would be hard to stomach under normal circumstances.
“Any of those things in isolation, I would be skeptical about. … I would say, ‘Well, I don’t know if that’s the greatest idea in the world, you’re opening Pandora’s Box,’” he said.
“If you want to save democracy, I think you got to do all of those things because we just are moving further and further away from being anything close to democracy.”
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