Rep. Jim Clyburn said Sunday he wants Congress to expand the Supreme Court from nine justices to 13, putting a specific number behind a proposal that Democrats have debated for years without committing to. Asked directly on NBC's Meet the Press whether he supported adding four seats, Clyburn answered yes. "Thirteen is a pretty good number," he said. "A baker's dozen would be a good number to have on the court."
The South Carolina Democrat tied his call to what he described as the court moving the country backward on constitutional interpretation. He framed the argument through the Reconstruction amendments and the civil-rights rulings of the Warren Court era, saying the current court's direction on those precedents justified significant congressional action.
Clyburn specifically cited decisions involving the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act as the basis for his frustration. His criticism was aimed at the court's direction as a whole, not any single ruling — and he paired that institutional critique with a direct reversal on one of the justices currently sitting on it.
During the same interview, Clyburn said he no longer stands by his 1991 vote to support Clarence Thomas's confirmation. He said he had expected Thomas's own background and personal experiences to shape his approach to civil-rights precedent. That expectation, Clyburn said, proved wrong — and he acknowledged he had made a mistake.
Thomas has served on the court since his confirmation 35 years ago. Clyburn's recantation does not carry any procedural consequence for Thomas, who holds a lifetime appointment. But the public admission from a senior House Democrat who backed Thomas during a bitter confirmation fight adds political weight to arguments for structural changes to the court itself.
The expansion proposal Clyburn endorsed would increase the court's membership by nearly half in a single act of legislation. It would not require any sitting justice to retire or step aside. All nine current members would remain, with four new colleagues added alongside them.
The practical effect of adding four seats depends entirely on who controls the White House and the Senate at the moment a bill passes. The president nominates justices and the Senate confirms them — the same process that filled the current nine seats. Four open seats filled by a president of one party would reshape the court's ideological balance for decades.
Clyburn is not the first Democrat to back the number 13. The proposal was also endorsed by former Vice President Kamala Harris during her 2024 presidential campaign. Its link to Harris gives the idea a specific political lineage inside the party, one that Clyburn's public support extends into the current congressional session.
The Constitution sets no fixed number for the court. Congress established six seats through the first Judiciary Act in 1789 and adjusted the number several times over the following eight decades. The bench settled at nine in 1869 — a number that has held for 157 years without another change.
Proponents of expansion frequently note that the federal judiciary is organized into 13 circuits, and that Supreme Court justices already divide responsibility for emergency applications arising from those circuits among themselves, with some assigned more than one. The argument is that 13 justices would align the court's membership with the structure below it.
Opponents of expansion argue that adding seats in response to rulings a party dislikes undermines judicial independence. The counterargument — already circulating in response to Clyburn's interview — is that if a Democratic Congress passed such a bill, the four new seats would be filled by whoever holds the presidency at that moment. Critics noted that under current conditions, that president is Donald Trump.
Clyburn did not address that specific scenario in the Meet the Press interview. His argument rested on the principle that the court's size is a congressional decision, made before and capable of being made again, rather than on the immediate politics of who would make the nominations.
