The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais greatly restricted the reach of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the provision long used to challenge racially discriminatory voting systems. Read alongside the court’s earlier Voting Rights Act rulings, the statute now offers only limited protection against such systems and is likely to invite more aggressive line-drawing, disfavoring minority voters in some states.
Callais is part of a broader pattern. In recent years, the court has not only curtailed protections for voting rights but also eliminated a federal constitutional right to abortion, greatly narrowed the permissible scope of gun regulation, restricted the authority of federal agencies to address climate change and established broad presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.
Each of these decisions — many issued by the same 6–3 majority — has reshaped its field. Taken together, they have shifted where power resides in our democracy — away from elected branches and toward the court.
What can be done about this run?
The difficult reality is that, for most of the court’s consequential recent decisions, the familiar tools of correction are unlikely to produce timely or meaningful change.
Congress can, to be sure, override Supreme Court rulings grounded in statutory interpretation by amending the statute or clarifying its terms. But that path meets with only occasional success, as in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which overturned decisions that had narrowed workplace discrimination claims. Such legislation is also necessarily subject-matter specific and cannot address a run of decisions across multiple domains.
Other rulings rest squarely on constitutional interpretation, such as the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization abortion decision in 2022 and the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision in 2022 on firearms regulation. In these cases, legislation cannot override the results. The formal remedies — a constitutional amendment requiring supermajorities in Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states, gradual change in the court’s composition, and structural reforms such as ethics rules or term limits — are, in practice, extraordinarily difficult, slow, uncertain or contested.
A third category includes decisions that nominally interpret statutes but are driven by underlying constitutional concerns. Rather than strike a statute down, the court adopts a “saving construction” that leaves the statute nominally in place while diminishing its practical effect. Callais itself is such a decision. Congress can attempt a response by amending the statute or clarifying its terms. But such a fix is likely to run into the same constitutional problems that led to the saving construction — problems the court may invoke again to narrow or invalidate the revised law.
There remains another option. The Constitution does not fix the size of the Supreme Court. Congress has changed it before — six times in all, increasing it five times and decreasing it twice, with the number of justices ranging from six to 10. The current size of nine dates to 1869, the longest period in the nation’s history without change. Congress may change it again by ordinary legislation.
Expanding the court would carry risks. It could invite successive expansions or contractions by future Congresses, further straining public confidence in the institution.
But the status quo — a sustained pattern of decisions that fundamentally changes the legal landscape and displaces choices made by elected branches — carries a greater risk of damaging the court’s perceived legitimacy. Public confidence has already declined markedly in recent years: A July 2025 Gallup poll placed approval at 39%, down from 62% in 2001.
In Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857 and Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the court announced doctrines that persisted for decades, most visibly and catastrophically in the long era of Jim Crow. These decisions illustrate how mistaken and consequential interpretations can endure absent timely and effective correction.
Expanding the size of the court is best understood not as a response to any single decision, but to a sustained run of them — and to what that run suggests about those still to come.
It is a lawful measure, one Congress has used before. It would require electoral realignment, including majorities in both houses of Congress and a supportive president, and the timing of any such realignment is uncertain. But expansion may be the only reform capable of producing timely change on a scale commensurate with the court’s recent decisions.
Robert E. Lehrer is a retired Chicago attorney whose practice focused on plaintiffs’ civil rights litigation.