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Minority Leader Jeffries Drops The Mask, Signals Democrats Are Coming For The Court

Zero Rss
1 month 4 weeks ago
Minority Leader Jeffries Drops The Mask, Signals Democrats Are Coming For The Court

Hakeem Jeffries has developed a habit of saying out loud what his party once preferred to keep vague.

Hakeem Jeffries (photo: Anna Moneymaker, Getty)

Speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Atlanta, the House minority leader told the audience that Democrats see "[a] variety of different options that are on the table, and I think we can't foreclose on any single one of them" when it comes to the Supreme Court. The options under discussion include adding justices and imposing 18-year term limits on the ones already seated. The man floating them runs the House Democratic caucus and stands one election away from the speaker's gavel.

Jeffries also described the Court, in the same appearance, as "a subsidiary of the MAGA Republican Party."

For years, Democrats have been more cautious about openly discussing expanding the Supreme Court, but now they're not even hiding their intentions. Speaking at the National Urban League Conference in Nashville earlier this month, former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed expanding the court to thirteen justices.

"We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices like we have 13 District Courts," she said.

There are 94 federal district courts. There are 13 circuit courts. If the number of justices is supposed to match the number of lower courts, Harris picked the wrong number - or the wrong argument.

NBC's Kristen Welker put the question to Jeffries on Meet the Press on Sunday, noting Harris's comments on the issue. Jeffries declined to say yes, and he declined to say no. "What I support is dramatic reform, and what that looks like, to begin with, is making sure that the Supreme Court actually has an ethical code of conduct so that they're not able to simply conduct themselves in ways that are inconsistent with the notion in this country that no one is above the law," he said.

Then he named names. "We've seen right-wing justices like Thomas and Alito engage in behavior that is ethically questionable at best," Jeffries said. "That has to change, because the American people should have confidence in the highest court in the land." The ethics talk served as the on-ramp. He went on to describe reforms needed to deliver a court "functioning like a separate and coequal branch of government," and pointed to the Callais decision, where, according to Jeffries, "the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in ways that do the bidding of extreme MAGA Republicans who turned around in the deep south and unleashed these Jim Crow-like tactics, yes, I have a problem with that. It's inconsistent with the law and with the Constitution."

The same Court has ruled against Trump on birthright citizenship and on his tariff agenda, and he has won a lopsided share of the cases he has brought before it. Jeffries has not explained how a subsidiary rules against its parent.

What will those "reforms" look like? Jeffries wouldn't say, but told Welker, "Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and other Judiciary Committee Dems are going to take the lead on what dramatic reform of the Supreme Court looks like," Jeffries said. A caucus assigns committee leads for legislation it intends to write, and such legislation exists to change who wins cases.

A group of Senate Democrats introduced a bill last month establishing 18-year terms and creating a Supreme Court appointment every two years.

The math, of course, is a problem for this. Any such bill needs 60 votes in the Senate, and, as president, Trump can still veto anything the Democrats might pass. Democrats understand both facts, which makes the quieter half of Jeffries' message worth a closer read. He endorsed major changes to Senate rules so a bare majority can pass legislation, and he invoked the last attempt, when Democrats held Congress and the White House under Joe Biden, and tried to nuke the filibuster for their election reform bills. The only thing that stopped that from happening was Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who refused to go along with the scheme, but neither is in the Senate anymore, and the party is much more unified today.

This is why Trump, who has seen the same math, has been warned that a Democratic majority will kill the filibuster to remake the court as a left-wing institution, and has urged Republicans to beat them to the punch, nuke the filibuster and help accelerate his agenda while they can. Trump has separately demanded that Jeffries apologize for calling the Court illegitimate.

Jeffries' comments make clear that Democrats have no qualms about gutting longstanding institutions to make them work more for their party and its agenda, which means what's at stake in the upcoming midterms and the 2028 election is bigger than just who controls Congress or the White House, it might very well change how our government works.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/18/2026 - 21:20
Tyler Durden

The exodus from California continues –– to fix it, do this

NY Post
1 month 4 weeks ago
California Dreamin’ … of Texas, Florida and Tennessee. That’s the state of play in 2026. The home of sun-drenched beaches, Yosemite and Silicon Valley is one of just five states that lost residents in 2025 compared with 2024, per an analysis by the financial technology company SmartAsset. The study, published this week, found that “California...
CA Post Editorial Board

Forbes Editor Fired Over $6m Payoff Had Threatened Companies Who Dared Hire Outgoing Trump Admin Officials In 2021

Zero Rss
1 month 4 weeks ago
Forbes Editor Fired Over $6m Payoff Had Threatened Companies Who Dared Hire Outgoing Trump Admin Officials In 2021

Authored by Monica Showalter via American Thinker,

Remember how vindictive the political scenario after Joe Biden first took office? It wasn't just the draconian prosecutions of Jan. 6 protestors, most of whom were non-violent and unarmed, many of them little old ladies. One guy got sent to jail who wasn't even at the scene of the Capitol crowd control incident.

Randall Lane at the ‘Forbes’ 50 Over 50 Luncheon on Dec. 8, 2022. Credit :
Cindy Ord/Getty

There also were the blacklisters. They vowed to hunt down and punish one in one way or another any former official who spent time in the Trump administration, putting them on public lists to ensure that none would be able to find future employment. It was vicious stuff and there were former Trump small fry who were unable to get jobs after leaving the White House for no other reason but this..

The scandal-plagued Lincoln Project drew the most publicity for this blacklisting project, but there was also another skeevy group called the Transition Integrity Project, and together with the Lincoln Project Stasi-wannabes shared big-dollar donors. Both kicked off their blacklisting plans around the same time in the early part of 2021, seemingly coordinating their talking points. I wrote about that here.

There was a third advocate for blacklisting, too - this guy, Randall Lane, the chief content officer at Forbes magazine.

He wrote this:

Whoa. @Forbes chief content officer warns against hiring @kayleighmcenany or other prominent Trump flacks: "Hire any of Trump's fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie." https://t.co/KeXF2gVXVV

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) January 9, 2021

According to NPR:

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Communications officials from the Trump administration might have a hard time finding work after January 20. That's at least what the chief content officer of Forbes is hoping. Citing numerous lies by various press secretaries throughout the Trump administration, Randall Lane wrote a column, warning businesses this way - if you hire any of Trump's communications officials, Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. To talk more about this is Randall Lane. He joins us now.

Welcome to the program.

RANDALL LANE: Thanks, Audie.

CORNISH: So was this inspired by the violent sacking of the Capitol last week, or is this something you've been thinking about for a while?

LANE: A little of both. First, to clarify, we were just talking about the four press secretaries, plus Kellyanne Conway - the people who are paid by the American people to talk to the American people, to inform the American people. And looking at Wednesday night, there was no way to look at that and not recognize that that entire day was built on a foundation of lies. The people who were in the Capitol believed what they'd been told about rigged election. And again, that was based on lies. There needs to be a reset, and we need to hold ourselves to an accountability standard where truth and facts matter because that's the path forward for a healthy democracy.

CORNISH: I'm going to reveal some bias here and ask - you know, part of the job of political communications, as I have experienced it, is to spin - that it's rarely straight facts.

LANE: Yes.

CORNISH: What was different about this experience to you?

LANE: Yes. The job of press secretaries sometimes is a lie of omission or it's a spin. But never have we had, in modern history, an administration where up was down, right - you know, blue is yellow. Sean Spicer set the tone from Day 1 when he asked Americans to not believe their eyes when he's saying, this was the largest inauguration in history. And again, that's a trivial fact. But that's also what made it so bad because it established from minute one that there was no standard for what the truth is. And that's what's different.

As a matter of fact, no, it's not different. All you have do do is look at the statements of Jen Psaki or Joe Lockhart to recognize the real lies. Somehow, those press secretaries didn't bother him.

This was just naked Trump hate, or some kind of talking points obedience as it came at the same time as the other two organizations beating that drum. Very disgusting to see in an editor who clearly was consumed by his own political hatreds, which only made themselves known at that moment. Weird, really.

Turns out this guy was on the take, though, and got fired from his job because of it, failing to disclose a $6 million payment from R.J. Shook, a content partner, in a transation explicitly forbidden by Forbes rules and its handbook. He, uh, forgot.

Really?

It's a rule everyone would have known about and would have been carefully enforced and I know this because I used to work there 20 years ago. I cannot imagine any of the great editors of Forbes I worked with - Bill Baldwin, Tim Ferguson, Laurie Minard, Nigel Holloway, or Luisa Kroll, to take a few examples, ever doing such a thing, it wouldn't happen, they were always very careful to avoid any conflicts of interest or violations of the rules, and they always kept politics out of their writing. They were extremely conscientious editors. They had integrity.

He didn't. So the question raised now is whether someone paid him off for that vindictive call for blacklists of former Trump officials. I have found no evidence it was R.J. Shook or Shook Research, they only revealed that Lane was buyable for the right price. The fact that Lane took big dollars, from Shook Research, which had an interest in rankings of money managers, probably indicated some kind of quid pro quo. So was there another payoff from somewhere else for the loud calls to blacklist? We know the donors were donating. That might be worth looking into given the egregious nature of what he did.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/18/2026 - 20:55
Tyler Durden

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