A constitutional amendment to permanently cap the Supreme Court at nine justices failed in the House on Wednesday afternoon, even though a majority of lawmakers voted for it. Nearly all Democrats voted against it, denying the measure the two-thirds threshold it needed.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., fast-tracked the bill by “suspending the rules,” a procedural move that let it skip committee steps but raised the bar for passage from a simple majority to two-thirds. That trade-off proved fatal.
The push, led by Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., was aimed directly at a fear President Trump has voiced repeatedly: that Democrats, if they retake control of Congress, would move to expand the Supreme Court and pack it with favorable justices. Trump’s concern is not hypothetical — former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have both backed the idea of restructuring the court.
The Constitution leaves it to Congress to set the number of seats on the bench, currently nine — eight associate justices and one chief justice. Nothing in the text fixes that number permanently, which is exactly the gap Biggs’s amendment sought to close.
“Here’s the question every American should ask: If a sitting majority can change the size of the Supreme Court the moment it dislikes rulings, what happens to the next time the other side is in power?” Biggs said. “Once you go down that road, the court stops being an independent check on government power. It becomes another political institution controlled by whoever happens to hold the majority.”
Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., framed the Democratic resistance as part of a longer campaign to seize the court for political ends. “For decades, we have heard calls from those unhappy with the ideological balance of the Supreme Court to pack the court. The alarming rise of such calls should worry all of us, because their objective is not to uphold ethical principles or even to protect individual rights, but rather to consolidate power and intimidate the court,” Harris said.
Democrats call it a partisan lock-in
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., one of the progressives who has floated expanding the court to 13 justices, pointed out that Congress has changed the size of the Supreme Court before and called nine an arbitrary number now being treated as sacred.
“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,” Raskin said. “It’s 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’s supplied by this presidential administration. So, the MAGA party wants to cement into place a profoundly partisan and lopsided … court that was gerrymandered and engineered by Mitch McConnell.”
That was a reference to former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who was instrumental in securing the court’s current conservative majority. Some progressives argue that expanding the bench to 13 justices would give each federal circuit court one representative on the high court.
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., said locking the court at nine would simply entrench the current majority for a generation. “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 right-wing majority, which is engaged in an unprecedented assault on Supreme Court norms and our constitutional order for the past several years,” Scanlon said.
The vote leaves the door open for a future Congress to change the number of seats on the court by ordinary legislation — the exact scenario Trump and Republicans wanted to foreclose.
