“I want the House to reject this constitutional amendment. The Constitution gives Congress the power to set the number of Supreme Court justices, and we have changed that number seven times in our history. Republicans just want to permanently lock in the current conservative majority on the Court.”

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. In this 119th Congress we have watched the President’s followers in Congress surrender to the President one constitutional power after another. Amazingly, the Speaker and the MAGA party have abdicated nearly every single essential power that the Framers exclusively vested in us, Congress, the Representatives of the people. First is the power to declare war, which has been usurped by the President with catastrophic results for the country and without a peep from his sycophants in Congress. Next is the spending power, the power of the purse, the power to appropriate Federal dollars to spending and grant programs and to specify their purposes, powers that have been continually violated in acts of impoundment, nullification, and redirection by the President who has not only effectively shut down the Department of Education, USAID, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but has even helped himself, without any appropriation from Congress, to $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to give away to Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other convicted insurrectionists who attacked this body in order to try to overthrow a Presidential election in January of 2021; Next is the power to impose tariffs and taxes and the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, powers that have been ripped away from us without any protests from the majority so the President could launch preposterous trade wars against the world and aggressively insult and alienate our beloved neighbor and democratic ally Canada. They have abandoned even the power to decide whether or not the President should receive Presidential emoluments, gifts, payments from foreign governments as he piles up a pirate’s treasure of hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts from foreign autocracies and monarchies. They have abandoned the unquestioned exclusive congressional power of Congress to build and exercise control over needful buildings and structures for the national government like the White House; the Reflecting Pool, which they are now calling the strait of warm ooze; and The Kennedy Center. All of these structures are being bulldozed, demolished, desecrated with Presidential graffiti, and renovated according to unilateral and independent executive decisions without even congressional consultation--all for the first time in American history. They are dangerously ceding our power to regulate the times, places, and manner of Federal elections conducted in the States to the post office and to our monarchically minded President who has no constitutional role in elections and was impeached by this Chamber for inciting a violent insurrection to try to overthrow an election, which he lost by more than 7 million votes, 306-232 in the electoral college. So what constitutional power do our colleagues propose to surrender today? Well, it is just a power that Congress has had since the beginning of the Republic under Article III, Section 1: the power to define the composition of the Supreme Court and the number of Justices who serve there. Over the course of our history, Congress has exercised this authority seven different times by changing the number of Justices on the Court. With the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress established the first Court with six Justices. In 1801, President Adams and Congress shrank it to five Justices. When President Jefferson won in 1800 and came back to power, then it was back to six Justices. In 1807, Congress expanded it to seven Justices when it created the Seventh Circuit, keeping to the congressional tradition of one Justice per Federal Circuit. In 1837, Congress expanded the number of Federal Circuits to nine and then added the corresponding two seats to the Court, bringing the Court to nine Justices. In 1863, Congress briefly added a 10th Federal Circuit during the Civil War and added a 10th Justice, giving Lincoln one more to appoint. In 1866, Congress went back to seven Justices. In 1869, President Grant and Congress increased the Court to nine again with another Judiciary Act, again, matching the number of Justices to Federal Circuits. That is the tradition of circuit riding. Today, we still have nine Justices, although we have 13 Federal judicial circuits, the vast majority of which are not represented by even a single Justice among the nine currently serving on the Supreme Court. In fact, the floor leader from Arizona has not only no Justices from his State on the Supreme Court, there are no Justices from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has 67 million Americans living there. Five of the Justices today come from the New York City metropolitan area, basically one for each borough. Is it really possible that there are not people from other parts of the country who could effectively and honorably serve on the Supreme Court? Well, if we decided this on an originalist basis, we might move to place 13 Justices on the Court to match our 13 Federal circuits or we might go to 6 Justices, which was the original number there. However, MAGA’s proposal is to strip Congress of all authority in the matter, to freeze it and cement it permanently in the constitutional architecture for all time, with the suddenly magic number nine. This is odd. Nine is neither the number of Federal circuits we have-- that is 13--nor is it the original number of Justices Congress placed on the Court. That was 6. Therefore, what is going on here? Well, surprise, surprise, America, it is another partisan power grab by MAGA, our colleagues who fear for the results of the November election, as their policies have brought us nothing but war, inflation, corruption, lawlessness, and a $40 trillion debt, one-quarter of it supplied by this Presidential administration. The MAGA party wants to cement into place a profoundly partisan and lopsided 6-3 Roberts Court that was gerrymandered and engineered by Mitch McConnell after the untimely deaths of Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg, each in the final year of a Presidential term. After Justice Scalia died on February 13, 2016, President Obama nominated my constituent, Merrick Garland, to fill the seat. Senator McConnell did not even allow hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee, much less a vote in the committee, much less a vote on the floor. He said he wanted to let the people decide, and 11 months was too close to the next election; forgetting, I suppose, that President Obama had won one of those genuine constitutional 4-year terms in office. That seat sat open for a record-setting 422 days before they filled it with Justice Gorsuch. In other words, they were for an eight-Justice Court during that year, but when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, less than 2 months before the election, when early voting had already started in some States, Senator McConnell rushed through confirmation hearings and then a final vote for Amy Coney Barrett just 8 days before the 2020 Presidential election took place, laughing about this glaring disparity in treatment, acknowledging what everyone knew: Well, that 1-year rule was just for the Democrats. They were very happy to barrel through that nomination at the last moment. Now, by essentially stealing these two seats from the American people, MAGA has put four of the five seats in the ruling majority rightwing faction in the hands of Justices appointed by two Presidents who lost the Presidential popular vote--George W. Bush in 2010 and Donald Trump in 2016. The rightwing capture of the Court, fueled by corporate dark money and the Citizens United decision, has plunged this Court into a legitimacy crisis, an ethics crisis, and a jurisprudential crisis like has never been seen before in American history. Trump’s followers in Congress now seek to freeze into place the political Court that MAGA built for decades to come. Thus, they urge us to give away another critical power that the Framers vested in us. As gas and diesel prices soar out of control and Trumpflation spirals up for groceries, healthcare, housing, as Trump’s reckless and forever war of choice in Iran spirals downward, and America increasingly stands isolated in the world, MAGA wants to impose a straitjacket clamp-down on our democracy, our freedom, and our constitutional rights. The Roberts Court overthrew Roe v. Wade and destroyed the constitutional right of women to comprehensive healthcare in every State in the country. It demolished the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, and the Callais decision just this term. Also, these fraudulent textualists invented out of thin air Presidential immunity from prosecution for felony crimes committed in office. In Federalist 51, Madison said that the major safeguard against tyranny and despotism in America would be the natural identification and loyalty that Members of Congress would show to our own branch of government. We would stand up for ourselves, Madison thought. ``Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,’’ he wrote, but today’s Republicans show no loyalty to the constitutional architecture of Congress, to our rights, our prerogatives, our powers. They are content just to keep their heads down, to close up shop, to go home as early as possible just to keep their jobs so the President will not mobilize social media and Elon Musk’s money against them in a primary. They want to preserve their survivability, their marketability. What a humiliating and spectacular collapse of the tradition of congressional self-respect and constitutional patriotism. I urge every colleague in this body to oppose this ridiculous constitutional amendment and giveaway of congressional powers, and I reserve the balance of my time.”

“I oppose this constitutional amendment. Congress has changed the size of the Supreme Court seven times in our history. Supporters want to permanently lock in the number nine just because they like the current court, but they have not given a single good reason to do so.”

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The floor leader offers a charming and completely self-defeating argument when he goes to the Roosevelt plan. FDR was a President, and Congress rejected his plan. The gentleman acknowledges that Congress has changed the size of the Supreme Court seven different times, and we have also declined to change it several times. Now, he describes what Roosevelt wanted to do as Court packing. This is Court packing on steroids. The gentleman wants to say that this President happens to like the people on the Court right now, through all of the packing and stacking and gerrymandering that has taken place in the last few years, and therefore we should freeze it, not just only for his own term but for all time. That is extraordinary. In the meantime, they have not offered a single argument to explain why nine Justices should be the number that we constitutionalize and place in cement forever. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson), who is the ranking member of the Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet Subcommittee.”

“I oppose this resolution. Republicans and rich donors spent billions of dollars to put conservative judges on the Supreme Court. Now that conservative majority helps wealthy donors, allows secret money in politics, and makes it harder for Black people and regular Americans to vote. This bill is just an attempt to protect their control over the Court.”

“Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time, and I rise in opposition to this resolution. For decades, MAGA Republicans have systematically chipped away at the impartiality of our third branch. They have already delegitimized our judiciary, yet they now stand before the American people pretending to be guardians of judicial integrity. Today’s blatant attempt to rewrite history would be laughable if the consequences were not so dangerous for our democracy, but history matters. The American people deserve to understand how we got to this moment. To understand how we get here, we must follow both the money and the machinery behind the modern conservative legal movement. The Roberts Court is the culmination of a decades-long crusade by Republicans to concentrate power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many by packing the United States Supreme Court and the lower Federal courts as well. Wealthy donors and corporate interests led by The Federalist Society spent billions of dollars to pack the judiciary with rightwing, conservative, corporate, polluting-serving judges and justices, and nowhere is the success of this decades-long Court-packing effort more visible than at the Supreme Court where a carefully curated, appointed, and conservative supermajority now delivers the conservative outcomes this movement spent billions of dollars to achieve, and achieve they did. In the last several years, the Roberts Court opened the floodgates to unlimited dark money in our political system, empowering billionaires and oligarchs and other powerful special interests to accomplish through the Supreme Court what they can’t accomplish through the legislative branch, and that is to drown out the voices of ordinary Americans. Abraham Lincoln once said that: ``This government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.’’ Yet that seems to be the vision for America that Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Alito, and the other MAGA majority members on the Court believe. Where some enjoy easy access to the ballot box while others are forced to overcome legal barriers, this is not America. They want to make it such that the voices of those who look like Justice Thomas are quieter. Our Nation is now in Jim Crow 2.0. We are a nation where the right to vote can, once again, be diluted, restricted, or simply ignored and where the voices of rich and powerful people carry more weight than the voice of ordinary Americans; but, particularly, Americans who look like Clarence Thomas, who no longer have the equal opportunity to elect the Representatives of their choice. The American people deserve a judiciary that serves our democracy, not a narrow ideological agenda that only benefits the rich and powerful. Mr. Speaker, I oppose this resolution.”

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“I oppose this amendment. Congress has always had the power to change the number of Supreme Court justices, often matching it to the number of federal court circuits. This amendment takes that power away from Congress just to protect the current court's conservative rulings.”

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I will try to answer the interesting questions raised by my distinguished colleague, Mr. Jordan, in seriatim. First of all, anything that we do to try to improve the fortunes and the well-being of the American people, our colleagues call socialist. They call Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid socialist. That is just water off our back. The President talks about communists. The only communists on Earth today are his best friends and his role models, like Kim Jong-un, who he writes love letters to, and President Xi, who he has praised more than two dozen times in public. How about Vladimir Putin, who he follows around like a puppy dog? Vladimir Putin was head of the KGB. If there is a problem with communism, it is over on that side of the aisle. The gentleman legitimately asked the question: Why did the former chair of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Nadler, advocate for an increase of four seats on the Supreme Court--which we are not debating today? What we are debating is whether Congress should have the power to do anything, to increase or reduce the size. He asked about that. It is a legitimate question. I will tell you exactly why. The gentleman may be unfamiliar with the history here, but Congress has traditionally linked the number of Justices on the Court to the number of Federal circuits. We have 13 Federal circuits. His proposal was to go from 9 to 13. Even the gentleman’s beloved Ninth Circuit--which I think he is supposed to be representing in some sense--would be represented on the Supreme Court. We could have one Justice from each Federal circuit. That is what circuit riding was all about. You don’t need some conspiracy theory to explain it. He was very overt about why he wanted to go from 9 to 13, which we could discuss another day. Here the question is whether we should nullify, obviate, and destroy our own power to decide who should be on the Court. Still, the gentleman has not offered one single argument explaining why the number nine should be magic other than it cements into place all the decisions of this rightwing Roberts Court. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Scanlon), the distinguished ranking member of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government.”

“I oppose this constitutional amendment to permanently set the Supreme Court at nine justices. It would lock in a conservative majority that has taken away rights and ignored ethics rules. Congress needs the power to reform the Court instead.”

“Mr. Speaker, as ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, I am here to emphasize that this proposed constitutional amendment would undermine our system of checks and balances and fly in the face of the Founders’ wisdom. I think it would be a grave mistake to dictate how many Justices should sit on the Supreme Court in perpetuity and, thereby, lock in for a generation, or more, a rightwing majority, which has engaged in an unprecedented assault on Supreme Court norms and our constitutional order. For the past several years, in the wake of the Court packing that occurred during the first Trump administration and under the Senate leadership of Mitch McConnell, constituents have called for Supreme Court reform at every townhall that I have held. Those calls have grown louder in the wake of each decision that has lessened our individual rights and liberties or enabled the administration to avoid accountability or overrule the powers and duties reserved to the American people through their Representatives in Congress and in the ethical lapses of the Court’s own members. People are paying attention. They are demanding a Court that is more responsive to we the people than to an administration that is beholden to special interests and oligarchs. The American public, the Founders, and the Constitution demand more than a misguided constitutional amendment that would permanently tie Congress’ hands by capping the number of Justices, especially when there are more pragmatic solutions that have not yet received due consideration. Mr. Speaker, I strongly urge my colleagues to reject this measure.”

“I oppose this amendment. The founders gave Congress the power to choose the number of Supreme Court justices. No one has given a good reason to fix that number at nine forever.”

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. By ``leftwing socialist group,’’ I assume the gentleman is referring to the Framers of the Constitution. It is the Framers who set up the system. They are trying to overthrow the system that the Framers created. The Framers gave Congress the power to control the number of Justices on the Court. Where does the number nine come from? I still await a single positive argument for why we should inscribe into law forever the number nine as the number of Justices we should have and nullify the power that the Framers of the Constitution and the Founders of the country gave to us. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Ms. Stansbury).”

“I am voting against this resolution. It locks in the current conservative Supreme Court and stops Congress from reforming it. The Court has hurt our rights and democracy. Congress needs to be able to make the Court fair and ethical.”

“Mr. Speaker, today, the GOP is proposing a constitutional amendment to lock in the current conservative Supreme Court. In fact, it would take away the power of this Congress to reform the Court. The question is why? Who asked them to do this? Where did this proposal come from? Why are Republicans arguing that they have to protect the Court from reform? This is a Court that has, under this conservative majority, undermined democracy, undermined our rights, and undermined the system of checks and balances that make this country great. These reforms would bring equity, fairness, and ethics to the Court. Why are my colleagues across the aisle bringing this constitutional amendment? It is clear in the debate here on the floor itself that they don’t even know how many Justices are currently sitting. In fact, my colleague across the aisle just claimed that there are currently 13 Justices sitting on the Court. What is this? Political theater? Is this what you plan to run on because you don’t actually have an agenda to run on this election cycle? Because you have decimated the economy, because you have an unending war in the Middle East, and because Americans can’t afford their healthcare, their housing, and putting food on the table and a roof over their head, I am a hell no on this resolution, and I will vote ``no.’’”

“I oppose this constitutional amendment to set the Supreme Court at nine justices. The public does not want this. Americans actually want amendments for equal rights, voting rights, and getting rid of corporate money in politics. Republicans are only pushing this to protect Donald Trump's power.”

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I will add to the remarks of the distinguished gentlewoman, this point: It is interesting that our colleagues suddenly want to dabble in constitutional amendment politics. Nobody is crying out for this, as my colleagues have argued, but you know what people want by 85 percent? People want the equal rights amendment. Where is the Republican Party on that? They used to support it. Three-quarters of Americans, more than 75 percent, want to overturn Citizens United by a constitutional amendment, which transformed every corporate treasury in America into a dark money political slush fund. We want to get rid of that. How come they are not here today on that? How about a constitutional amendment on the right to vote or abolishing the electoral college and giving us a national vote for President? We have commanding popular majorities that want all those things. Yet, they come forward with a constitutional amendment no one is talking about where you need two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-quarters of the States. You can measure the sincerity of this whole proposal by virtue of the fact that there is no national movement for it in any way. This is, again, another little bone that is chucked over toward the White House to show them that they want to freeze into place the vanishing power of Donald Trump. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.”

“Republicans only want to lock the Supreme Court at nine justices to protect their current majority. They were fine with eight justices when they blocked Merrick Garland for a year to let Donald Trump pick the next justice.”

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman quotes me as having said that I said there was no possible reason that someone would want nine. No, I didn’t say that at all. I think there might be a number of reasons. One very clear one is they want to freeze into place the majority they have in the Court right now, a majority that was created by the most suspect political maneuvers on the Senate side. The gentleman would like to lionize the number nine and place it in cement. Why wasn’t it nine when Senator McConnell blocked any confirmation or vote on a replacement for Justice Scalia after he died? He kept it at eight for an entire year in order to get to the next administration so they could put Justice Gorsuch in instead of my constituent, Merrick Garland, who is one of the most talented people ever nominated to the Supreme Court. He was the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, and they kept him off. Eight was fine with them then. Now, they want to go to nine because President Trump likes it just fine. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Menefee).”

“I want the House to vote against this amendment. The Constitution gives Congress the power to decide how many justices sit on the Supreme Court. We should not give that power away to protect a Court that has taken away voting and abortion rights, and where judges take secret gifts. People want ethics rules and term limits for the Court instead.”

“Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this constitutional amendment that would lock the number of Supreme Court Justices at nine. The more I listen to this debate, the more it is abundantly clear to me that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have no desire to use the power that was given to us under the Constitution. When President Trump starts a war in Iran, they refuse to pass a War Powers Resolution. Now I am hearing an argument that we should lock the number at nine because that is what the Supreme Court wants, but that is not how the Constitution works. The Constitution says that it is Congress that has the power to set the size of the Supreme Court. It is our call, and this has happened multiple times in the history of this country. Ask yourself, why would my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to give that power away? Because they want to lock in this Supreme Court--this Supreme Court that has gutted voting rights, this Supreme Court that has taken away a woman’s right to choose, and this Supreme Court where Justices take secret gifts and private jets and answer to absolutely nobody. Americans are asking for something in the Supreme Court. They are asking for reform. They want to see ethics reform. They want to see term limits. They want to see a Supreme Court that reflects the American people and not just the few, a small group of elites. Congress should be using its power, not giving it away. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no.’’”