Failed former VP and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris went on Keke Palmer’s podcast Tuesday and, in about ninety seconds, described what Democrats intend to do with power if they get all of it back.
Expand the Supreme Court. Add justices, she said, so the Court ‘reinforces the spirit and principles behind the Constitution.’ Change the Electoral College, because the popular vote has to matter (which she lost, by the way). Statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. These, she said, are the structural things that need doing.
Give her credit for candor. Most Democrats keep this material in the donor room. Take the items one at a time, because each is the same move wearing a different hat.
Court expansion is not reform. The number of justices has sat at nine since 1869, and the last president who tried to change it was Franklin Roosevelt — whose own party’s Senate buried the scheme, understanding exactly what it was. Harris’s justification is the tell: she wants a Court that reinforces Democrat interpretations of the Constitution, not the actual meaning of the amendments and the original context in which they were written and ratified.
In other words, the spirit, as determined by justices appointed for the purpose of reaching predetermined outcomes. That’s not a court. It’s a ratification body with robes.
The Electoral College item is even more revealing, because there is no national popular vote. There are fifty-one separate elections conducted under state law, and the aggregate tally is a statistic, not a legal instrument. The Framers built it that way deliberately so that candidates would have to assemble a coalition across regions rather than run up margins in a handful of metropolitan areas. Abolishing it would require a constitutional amendment — three-quarters of the states, including small ones being asked to vote away their own influence. Harris knows that. Which is why the practical push runs through interstate compacts between Democrat-controlled states and litigation instead.
Puerto Rico and D.C. statehood she at least qualified with “if the folks there want it.” Puerto Ricans have been asked repeatedly and have never delivered a clean mandate. D.C. was carved out of Maryland and Virginia precisely so that no single state would host the seat of federal government. What both proposals reliably produce is four additional senators from jurisdictions that vote one way.
Add it up: more justices, no Electoral College, four more solid Democrat Senate seats. Every item adjusts the machinery in the same direction. Then she pivoted to reestablishing ‘affordable child care,’ which is where the whole thing collapses on contact with her record. She was vice president for four years. Democrats held Congress for the first two. Nothing happened. Obama had two years with majorities and spent the capital on the Affordable Care Act. Child care is the sweetener you mention after the structural items, so the structural items sound like a means to something.
Three weeks out, she has told voters precisely what the agenda is. Believe her.
