Kamala Harris Dials Up the Democrats’ Radical Assault on the Rules of American Democracy

There they go again.

I’ve written often about the mounting radicalism of progressive plans to bulldoze central props of our constitutional order, such as packing the Supreme Court, abolishing the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster, and adding new states (including, unconstitutionally, D.C.) in order to tilt the national government in their direction. There is a grave risk that their desperation on the eve of the 2030 Census could lead them down this road if they have the White House and both houses of Congress in 2029. They are already talking themselves into it, as well as state-level radicalism such as attempting to force the entire Virginia Supreme Court into retirement over one ruling they don’t like — the timing of which they asked for.

These are not merely threats coming from the margins of the commentariat, but from its leaders in Congress and the chief law enforcement officer of Virginia. Hakeem Jeffries, the likely next speaker of the House, has vowed “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” is demanding “massive judicial reform” in which “everything should be on the table,” both “state by state and at the federal level,” and has been strategizing the potential defenestration of the entire Virginia Supreme Court. Meanwhile, state-level Democrats have been doing the January 6 thing again, with legislators in Tennessee — the same ones previously expelled for the same kinds of stunt — sanctioned for “interlocking arms and blocking aisles on the House floor,” “instigating and encouraging disruptions . . . in coordination with paid protestors and attendees,” and using “prohibited props and noisemakers on the House Floor.”

I’ve also covered for years now Kamala Harris’s authoritarian urge to advance these radical arguments, during her 2019 presidential bid and as vice president in 2024. Now, Harris is doubling down:

Look, this is a moment where there are no bad ideas. A no bad idea brainstorm, is what I’d like to call it. And in that no bad ideas brainstorm, we talk about what we need to do and think about doing around the Electoral College. We talk about the idea of Supreme Court reform, which includes expanding the Supreme Court. We invite a conversation about multi-members district….Let’s talk about statehood for Puerto Rico and DC. These are the things I think that we’ve got to do. We’ve got to neutralize these red states from cheating, including blue states expanding their maps and all of this, I think is, is look, we gotta fight fire with fire. These folks are playing to win. We gotta play to win.

Of course, the premise here — that only Republicans have engaged in gerrymandering, or even that Republicans were the first ones to try to unravel the district maps drawn after the 2020 Census — is the sheerest nonsense. In 2024, Republicans won fewer House seats than their share of the national two-party popular vote, due in good part to changes in the map in Democrats’ favor since 2022 in New York, Alabama, and Louisiana. Overall, in the 30 states where they won more than half of the House seats, Republicans won the statewide popular vote in all 30 and won an extra 36 seats more than their share of the vote. Across those 30 states, Republicans won 73.2 percent of the House seats with 58.4 percent of the popular vote. But in the 20 states where Democrats won more than half of the House seats, they lost the popular vote in one (Nevada, where the map still gave Democrats three of the four House seats with 37.4 percent of the popular vote), and won 39 extra seats, twelve of them in California alone. Across those 20 states, Democrats won 78.8 percent of the seats with 58.3 percent of the vote.

Harris’s star may have faded, but she remains, at this writing, the closest thing the Democrats have to a de facto head of their party: the most recent vice president and presidential nominee, a former statewide official of the largest state, and still typically the leader in 2028 presidential polls. And she’s arguing for ripping up the rulebook and destroying the independent judiciary. If there was ever a mask, it has dropped. Yet, the press will pretend that none of this is happening, and flacks for Harris and her party will tell us not to take her literally. While the radical spirit is running hot on both sides of the aisle right now, with the likes of Mike Lee talking openly about “nuking the filibuster,” nothing on the Republican side — not even from Donald Trump — promises such a drastic crossing of the Rubicon. If people with the ideas of Harris and Jeffries gain power, the American system of constitutional governance will be done for.