James Carville says Democrats need a radical plan to ‘save democracy,’ including new states
Democratic strategist and former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville has suggested that Democrats may have to add new states and seats to the Supreme Court to save democracy.
Carville, who made the comments during Wednesday’s episode of his Politics War Room podcast, said Democrats “are right when they say this democracy is really imperfect.”
The strategist said the changes had to be made if Democrats manage to win the House, the Senate, and the White House in 2028, which he called “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,” the 80-year-old said. “And they may have to expand the [Supreme Court] to 13 members.”
Congress would be able to enact legislation to expand the size of the nation’s highest court. Still, the idea hasn’t garnered significant support outside of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Four Democrats introduced a bill to expand the court in 2021. It was reintroduced in 2023.
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The size of the Supreme Court has fluctuated since it was established in 1789, but it has remained at nine since 1869.
Congress could also approve statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., but the proposal has never been close to passing. In 1979, the D.C. Voting Rights Amendment, which would have given D.C. certain state-like rights, such as representation in Congress, without actually making it a state, passed Congress by the required two-thirds majority but was only ratified by 16 states. Thirty-eight were needed for the Amendment to pass.
Carville also argued that Democrats should push for legislation to regulate congressional redistricting amid an effort by Texas Republicans to gerrymander five districts in the state held by Democrats.
In July, Carville said in a New York Times op-ed that “The Democratic Party is in shambles” and that it was “steamrolling toward a civilized civil war.”
While Carville didn’t address how likely his proposals were to succeed, he argued that the political environment the Democrats find themselves in requires that they take on proposals that would appear radical in different times.
“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’ve got to do all of those things because we just are moving further and further away from being anything close to democracy.”
