For years, many progressive Democrats have argued that the Supreme Court should be expanded by four seats. They call it “court reform.” Others call it “court balancing.” Critics have called it by a more accurate name: court packing.

The argument is simple. Democrats dislike the current ideological makeup of the Court, so they propose changing the rules until they achieve a different outcome. It is a remarkable admission that the problem is not with the Constitution, nor even with the qualifications of the justices. The problem, they argue, is simply that too many justices disagree with them.

But there is a simple thought experiment that exposes the weakness of the entire proposal.

If expanding the Supreme Court by four justices is fair when Democrats control Washington, why wouldn’t it be equally fair for President Donald Trump and a Republican Congress to do exactly the same thing? Now!

Imagine President Trump announcing tomorrow that he intends to appoint four additional constitutional originalists to the Supreme Court. Would the same politicians who have spent years demanding court expansion applaud his commitment to institutional reform?

Of course not.

They would denounce it as authoritarian. They would call it an assault on democracy. Editorial boards would declare the judiciary under attack. Cable news networks would run wall-to-wall coverage warning of constitutional crisis.

The very people who have insisted that adding four seats is perfectly legitimate would suddenly discover that it is dangerous, reckless, and fundamentally unfair.

That reaction reveals the truth.

The debate has never really been about the number of justices.

It has always been about who gets to appoint them.

The Supreme Court has consisted of nine justices since 1869. That number is not fixed by the Constitution, but it has endured through Republican and Democratic administrations alike because both parties gradually recognized that constantly changing the size of the Court would destroy public confidence in its independence.

Once one party expands the Court for political advantage, the other party has every incentive to respond in kind.

Nine becomes thirteen.

Thirteen becomes seventeen.

Seventeen becomes twenty-one.

Eventually the Supreme Court ceases to function as an independent judicial branch and instead becomes another political battlefield whose membership changes whenever power changes hands. Supreme Court Justices become political activists, appointed by the party what holds the White House.

The institution itself becomes the casualty.

Even President Franklin Roosevelt—perhaps the most powerful Democratic president of the twentieth century—failed in his attempt to enlarge the Supreme Court after the justices struck down portions of the New Deal. Roosevelt argued that additional justices were necessary for efficiency. Few believed him. Americans understood that the proposal was fundamentally about changing judicial outcomes rather than improving judicial administration.

Congress rejected the idea, including many members of Roosevelt’s own party.

History has generally vindicated that decision.

The genius of the American constitutional system lies in its separation of powers. The judiciary was intentionally insulated from day-to-day politics precisely so that constitutional rights would not depend upon whichever party happened to win the most recent election.

Court packing undermines that safeguard.

Ironically, many of the same politicians advocating Supreme Court expansion have spent years warning that American institutions must be protected from political interference. Yet they propose changing one of the nation’s oldest institutions because they dislike its current decisions.

That is not judicial reform.

It is political retaliation.

There is another question that proponents rarely answer. If four additional justices are appropriate today, why stop there?

Why not six? Why not ten?

What constitutional principle determines the “correct” number of justices?

There is none.

The only apparent principle is obtaining enough votes to guarantee preferred outcomes.

That is a dangerous precedent regardless of which party holds power.

Those who support court packing today should remember that political fortunes change. Every tool one administration creates eventually becomes available to its successor. That is exactly why the GOP refuses to do away with the filibuster; a tool that works against them currently.

If expanding the Court is acceptable when progressives hold the White House, it must also be acceptable when conservatives do.

If President Trump were to announce tomorrow that he intended to appoint four new constitutional originalists to a newly expanded Supreme Court, would today’s advocates of court packing cheer the decision?

Their answer would almost certainly be no. And that answer tells us everything we need to know.

The issue has never been the number nine. The issue has always been power.

The American people should be wary of any proposal that changes the rules of our constitutional system simply because one political faction dislikes the current outcome. The Constitution was designed to restrain temporary political passions, not surrender to them. Preserving the independence and legitimacy of the Supreme Court ultimately requires something increasingly rare in modern politics: the willingness to respect institutions even when they do not always produce the decisions we prefer.

For years, Americans were told that questioning Georgia’s 2020 election was itself a threat to democracy. But history has a way of complicating simple narratives.

The official result remains unchanged — thus far. Joe Biden carried Georgia by the slimmest margin; 11,779 votes. Yet, the story does not end there.

In the years since the election, investigators, auditors, journalists, courts, and election officials have continued uncovering procedural failures, recordkeeping problems, audit discrepancies, misplaced documentation, and other irregularities that raise a legitimate question: Was Donald Trump wrong to demand a closer look?

That question matters because one of the most famous moments of the post-election controversy became the basis for enormous legal and political attacks against Trump. During his January 2021 call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump asked officials to “find” 11,780 votes. Critics portrayed the statement as an attempt to manufacture votes. Find and manufacture are very different things.

Trump and his supporters argued that they believed legitimate votes had been overlooked, miscounted, or improperly handled, and that a thorough review would reveal enough errors to change the outcome.

Subsequent events make that argument harder to dismiss than many in the media originally suggested. During Georgia’s recount process, officials discovered nearly 6,000 ballots that had not been included in the original count because of reporting and scanning failures. Thousands of those votes favored Trump.

The discovery demonstrated something important: Missing votes were not a conspiracy theory. They existed.

Additional reviews later identified audit mistakes and tabulation discrepancies in Fulton County. State investigators found thousands of audit-related errors that should never have occurred in an election decided by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Again, officials maintained the mistakes were not large enough to alter the certified outcome. But they were mistakes nonetheless. Significant mistakes.

Then came further revelations. Fulton County officials acknowledged problems involving unsigned tabulator tapes and election documentation that should have been properly preserved and verified.

Questions surrounding election records continued years after the race had supposedly been settled. The credibility of the Georgia prosecution itself has suffered significant damage. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis became the subject of intense scrutiny after it was revealed that she had a romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whom she had hired to help lead the case against Trump. Courts ultimately disqualified Willis from continuing to prosecute the case unless Wade resigned, and subsequent legal battles, appeals, and ethics investigations have further delayed proceedings. What was once portrayed as one of the strongest cases against Trump has become mired in questions about prosecutorial misconduct, conflicts of interest, and whether political considerations played too large a role in one of the most consequential prosecutions in modern American history.

Most recently, federal investigators obtained election-related records and materials from Fulton County as part of an ongoing investigation. Fulton County Democrats fought the feds in court, and the court found in the fed’s favor. The legal battles surrounding those records continue.

Perhaps those investigations will ultimately reveal nothing significant. Perhaps they will reveal serious misconduct. There are indications of elections fraud. However, at this point, nobody knows the ultimate outcome of the federal investigation.

What Americans do know is that confidence in elections depends on transparency. Georgia has not been tranparent.

When elections are extraordinarily close, scrutiny should not be feared. It should be welcomed.

That is why many Americans view the legal campaign against President Trump in Georgia with increasing skepticism. The central question is not whether every claim made after the election turned out to be correct. The question is whether asking for a full accounting of ballots, records, audits, and procedures in a race decided by 11,779 votes should be treated as criminal conduct.

Reasonable people can disagree about Trump’s conclusions. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that there were no legitimate issues worthy of investigation.

The more that election officials acknowledge missing ballots, flawed audits, misplaced records, and procedural failures, the more many Americans wonder whether the response should have been greater transparency rather than criminal prosecution.

A healthy republic does not fear questions. It answers them. And four years later, Georgia still has questions that many citizens believe deserve answers.

In 1971, radical left activist Saul Alinsky published a book that would become one of the most influential political manuals of the modern American left: Rules for Radicals.

At the time, many Americans dismissed it as fringe political theory, a handbook for campus agitators, community organizers, and anti-establishment activists. Few understood how deeply its tactics would eventually penetrate American culture, education, media, bureaucracy, and politics.

Today, more than half a century later, Alinsky’s fingerprints appear almost everywhere.

The strategy was never primarily about persuading Americans through reasoned debate. It was about power — how to seize it, wield it, and use institutions and the Democratic Party themselves to reshape society from within.

Alinsky openly taught confrontation, polarization, ridicule, and pressure politics. Sound familiar? One of his most famous rules was simple: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Modern Americans now see that tactic daily. Political opponents are no longer merely people with traditional ideas. They are increasingly portrayed as existential threats, fascists, racists, extremists, traitors, or enemies of democracy itself. Public discourse has become less about persuasion and more about destruction.

That did not happen accidentally. The radical movements of the 1960s gradually evolved into institutional power centers. Activists moved from protest movements into universities, media organizations, foundations, education, nonprofits, unions, government agencies, entertainment, corporate HR departments, and eventually the permanent bureaucracy itself.

The old revolutionaries grew up, and then took over the institutions.

Hillary Clinton herself famously studied Alinsky while at Wellesley College and wrote her senior thesis on his organizing philosophy. Barack Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago in an environment heavily influenced by Alinsky-style political activism. Countless progressive organizations have openly adopted variations of his methods for decades.

The point was never simply to win elections. The point was to reshape the culture. And in many ways, it worked.

The American middle ground steadily eroded. Patriotism became suspect in elite circles. Traditional religion was increasingly marginalized, and now vilified. National identity fragmented into grievance politics and competing victim categories. Meritocracy gave way to ideological litmus tests. Bureaucracies expanded while accountability weakened. Public debt exploded. Government dependency grew. Universities became ideological sorting centers. Corporate America increasingly fused itself with activist politics.

Meanwhile, ordinary working Americans often felt as though the country they grew up in was disappearing beneath them.

The left insists these changes represent progress. In fact, they represent decay.

What cannot seriously be denied is that America has become dramatically more polarized, more distrustful, more bureaucratic, and more culturally fragmented over the past several decades.

Alinsky understood something important about political psychology: people can often be manipulated more effectively through emotion than reason. Anger mobilizes. Fear mobilizes. Division mobilizes. Envy mobilizes. Constant outrage keeps political movements alive.

That is why modern politics increasingly feels like permanent warfare. Every issue becomes apocalyptic. Every election becomes “the most important in history.” Every disagreement becomes a moral emergency. And compromise becomes betrayal.

This atmosphere benefits institutional power brokers. A frightened, confused and divided public becomes easier to control, easier to manipulate, and easier to direct toward ever-expanding government authority.

Ironically, many Americans who consider themselves moderates now find themselves pushed toward populism or conservatism not because they became more radical, but because the cultural center itself moved sharply leftward.

Policies once considered extreme gradually became mainstream inside elite institutions and the Democratic Party:

• open-border advocacy,
• aggressive identity politics,
• speech policing,
• gender ideology mandates,
• sprawling administrative regulation,
• massive federal spending,
• and the increasing use of government power to pressure dissenting viewpoints.

The constitutional republic envisioned by the Founders is slowly being replaced by a managerial state governed less by elected representatives and more by entrenched bureaucratic, corporate, legal, academic, and media networks.

That concern is no longer limited to conservatives.

Even many independents and classical liberals, like Jonathan Turley, now express alarm at censorship pressures, politicized institutions, ideological conformity, and the disappearance of basic civic trust.

America’s Founders understood something modern activists often forget: republics survive only when citizens share enough common identity, moral restraint, and mutual legitimacy to govern themselves peacefully.

A politics built entirely around division eventually consumes itself.

Saul Alinsky did not create America’s polarization alone. But his methods helped normalize a style of political warfare that increasingly dominates modern public life.

The tragedy is that many ordinary Americans — left, right, and center — no longer feel they inhabit the same country psychologically, culturally, or morally. And that may be the most dangerous legacy of all.

The American Dream was built by a nation confident enough to believe in shared opportunity, shared sacrifice, and shared citizenship. If America is to recover that spirit, it will require rejecting the permanent politics of rage and rediscovering something larger than factional victory. Because once every institution becomes a battlefield, eventually the nation itself becomes the casualty.