Henry C. "Hank" Johnson, Jr. · TranslatePolitics.com

House of Representatives

Proposing an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States to Require That the Supreme Court of the United States Be Composed of Nine Justices

2026-09-02

“I don't like this resolution. The other side is bad and mean. They pretend to care about the courts. They want power for their friends. They want to take away people's rights. This is not good for people who look like Justice Thomas. We should not pass this resolution.”

Official Congressional Record

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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