The Senate nominee has woefully undercooked ideas on Supreme Court reform—and that’s a problem.
Abdul El-Sayed during a primary election night watch party.
(Sarah Rice / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Progressive Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate last week over a wet-blanket establishment Democrat, and the left has been on a high. Rightly so. El-Sayed is a progressive and a reformer who supports Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and an arms embargo on Israel. He’s young and energetic and does not, to my knowledge, have any Nazi-adjacent tattoos. He’s probably the best candidate progressives can hope for in a battleground state like Michigan.
I support his candidacy enthusiastically, and I want people to remember I said that, because I’m about to unload on him.
For all of El-Sayed’s strong lefty credentials, he has so far come off like an unserious neophyte on the most crucial issue that is needed to unlock the progressive agenda: court reform. There is nothing that El-Sayed wants to do that he can do without reforming the Supreme Court. As a senator, he would be a critical vote towards reforming the Supreme Court and breaking its hammerlock over our society.
El-Sayed seems to understand the importance of Supreme Court reform. For one thing, he lists it as a priority on his campaign website—and he’s actually talked about it, which is more than I can say for most Democrats. He has said that the court “has become a major impediment to democracy.” So I’ll give him that.
But for an issue that demands concrete constitutional and civic solutions, El-Sayed has been light on the details for solving the problem he’s correctly identified. The few details he has provided sound like he’s been playing Mad-Libs with a ChatGPT “court reform” prompt. He has stitched together pleasing sounding buzzwords that amount to a fully incoherent strategy. In 2024 El-Sayed penned an article for the Detroit Metro Times that talked about court reform and came to the conclusion that… it’s complicated. He laid out all of the possible court reform plans and told readers that “we should try” something, without committing himself to any particular plan of action. If the question is “Does El-Sayed understand that there is a problem?,” I’d answer “Yes.” If the question is “Does El-Sayed have a solution?” I’d be forced to answer, “What is this man even talking about?”
As a candidate for Senate, El-Sayed got only slightly more specific. From what I can glean from his website and a TikTok video, his key proposal is term limits for Supreme Court justices. Now, I’ve argued repeatedly that term limits are the fool’s gold of court reform. They sound good, they’re politically popular, and they fix nothing. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think Supreme Court justices should hold lifetime power. But I’m far more concerned with how they wield their power than I am with the amount of time they get to hold it. Term limits do nothing to stop the current court, and the current evil it’s doing. Even the promise that the current justices will be replaced at some point in the future ignores the fact that they might well be replaced by people who are just as committed as they are to continuing their predecessors’ crusades against human rights and democracy.
Current Issue
Moreover, term limits are the hardest thing to do from a constitutional perspective. All of the other court reforms—from court expansion to jurisdiction stripping to ethics reform—can be done without a constitutional amendment. But there’s really no way to institute term limits without such an amendment. So when I hear Democrats extolling their love of term limits, all I hear are politicians selling the people on a solution they know cannot be implemented. A US senator has lots of powers, but amending the Constitution is not one of them. When El-Sayed says I support “term limits,” I interpret that as “nothing will change but I can say I tried.”
All of that would be bad enough, but in the one instance I could find of El-Sayed getting specific about term limits, he elucidated a proposal that was particularly nonsensical. In this TikTok video from November 2025, El-Sayed suggests 10-year term limits. Why 10? I don’t know, but my guess is that the number 10 focus-tested well with Elmo and his campaign staff. The most cited term-limit plans propose an 18-year term, and there is a very good reason for the number 18. If you have a nine-member Supreme Court all on staggered 18-year term limits, it would work out to two justices ending their terms over the course of four years. That would guarantee each president two appointments per four years in office. Eighteen-year term limits are being proposed because that’s how the math works. Ten-year term limits might be a nice round number, but they don’t actually make sense when plotted against four-year presidential terms. El-Sayed either knows that and doesn’t care, or doesn’t know why 18 years has emerged as the preferred term-limit option.
As if to piss me off personally, El-Sayed suggested that he pulled this idea—about the restructuring of an entire branch of government, mind you—largely out of the air. In the video, El-Sayed said he was “just spitballing” but that he has “thought a lot about it.” (For the record, I prefer Senate candidates who are not just spitballing on the most critical issue for the advancement of the progressive agenda.) El-Sayed then elaborated that, in his vision, “every president should get three appointments” to the Supreme Court. He said that with those three appointments, a president could either renominate a sitting justice to another 10-year term or appoint a whole new one and “expand the court.” (On his campaign website, where he is presumably not just spitballing, El-Sayed drops the specifics and proposes “allowing the same number of appointments for each presidential term.”)
Friends, I consider myself an expert on Supreme Court reform, and I cannot tell you exactly what all this is supposed to mean. Does this mean that El-Sayed supports court expansion, as long as it is part of each president’s new constitutionally allotted appointments? Uhh… maybe? But the bigger problem is that his proposal for three appointments per presidential term doesn’t fit with how Supreme Court appointments actually work. I’m no mathlete, so I could be missing something here—but, as I see it, to square the math, a justice would need to be replaced every 1.4 years. But it would be frankly insane, even to me, a guy with some insane-sounding ideas, to continually replace justices on this fractional schedule. You’d end up with justices hearing oral arguments and then being forcibly replaced before they could write their opinions. So either El-Sayed thinks that’s a good idea (it’s not) or he thinks we can replace just one-fourth of a justice every January (or June or whenever the hell these replacements are supposed to happen) or some kind of combination of both. Regardless, this plan would fail any contact with reality.
And that’s before we get into all of the regular problems that bedevil all term limit proposals, not just El-Sayed’s. What if a justice unexpectedly dies in the middle of their term, would replacing them count against a president’s magic three appointments? Would these new appointments (or renominating the old ones for that matter) be subject to the advice and consent of the Senate? What if the Senate refused to approve of a second term for one of the sitting justices? How is any of this supposed to even work?
And that’s the thing: It’s not supposed to work. Term limits are not a plan. Term limits are just focus-group tested sound bites designed to make people feel like something massive like Supreme Court reform is actually easy to do with an application of old-fashioned common sense. Term limits allow politicians to kick the Supreme Court reform can down the road: They’re popular and they sound like they’re doing something. But where is the part where El-Sayed addresses that “major impediment to democracy” stuff that is happening right now? Because letting alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh get “renominated” for another 10 years ain’t it.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
El-Sayed is an epidemiologist. I’m sure he would balk if I said we could prevent cancer by limiting Americans to just three cigarettes a day for 10 years, with another 10 years of smoking allowed to people who commit to using SPF-50 sunblock during the summer. He would refer me to data and science and implore me to speak to an expert before I ran my mouth about things I clearly do not understand.
Similarly, El-Sayed is right now able to call up any court reform expert in the country to educate him on how court reform could work and needs to work. Law professor Leah Litman is one of the cohosts of Strict Scrutiny (pretty much the most popular legal podcast around right now), a best-selling author who excels at explaining law to people who do not have law degrees, and teaches at the University of Michigan. She literally lives in the same state. El-Sayed could call her right now and, within two hours, be able to speak more coherently and knowledgeably about court reform.
But he hasn’t. Instead, he’s trying to spitball his way through this critical issue.
And this is why Democrats, democratic socialists, and all manner of lefty progressive activist types continually get our heads bashed in by the right wing when it comes to the Supreme Court. Republicans always treat the court as their most important bastion of power, the undemocratic branch that can trump all others. Lefties, of every description, treat the court like an afterthought, the thing that can be dealt with after all their more important policy initiatives are put in place.
We, on the left, have it completely ass-backwards. The Supreme Court is the first thing that must be addressed. Because if it is not addressed, then the Supreme Court can and will kill the entire rest of the progressive agenda. El-Sayed supports Medicare for All. So do I. Do you know how quickly the current Supreme Court will overrule a Medicare for All bill passed by Congress? Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch will get into a fistfight in the high court cafeteria over who gets the honor of punting Medicare for All into the sun.
We have to do better. El-Sayed has to do better. I want El-Sayed to win the election. I would have voted for him in the primary if I lived in Michigan. I want him to get to Washington and do all of the things he talks about. But if he, and both the progressive and establishment wings of the Democratic Party, cannot get court reform right, then he won’t be able to do any of the things he’s promised. If they don’t address the court first, then nothing else they address will matter. The Supreme Court, as currently constituted, will not allow Democrats to tackle this country’s problems. If you don’t believe me just read literally any of its rulings this decade when it comes to voting rights, labor rights, women’s rights, gun rights, or the limits on presidential power. The Supreme Court is not hiding the ball on its agenda. At some point, Democrats must read the memo the court has repeatedly sent them.
There is no progressive agenda without liberal control of the Supreme Court. Progressives like El-Sayed need to understand that. Until he does, until the people most excited for his candidacy do, we will continue to lose, no matter how many primaries and even general elections we win.
More from The Nation
More than 300,000 Wisconsin voters backed a democratic socialist’s gubernatorial bid. That’s the measure of the strength of a new kind of politics.
Corporate Dem Angie Craig outspent Flanagan by roughly four to one. But Flanagan’s ground game, and her promise to “avenge Minnesota” after ICE’s cruelty, gave her a 20-point win….
Many of those trying to bring the DNC chair down just want the party to continue to act as an ATM machine for their consultancies.
From frontline organizing to political commentary, her fierce, multiracial advocacy reshaped 20th-century liberation and continues to inspire social justice.
Long before Francesca Hong’s current bid for governor, the party was revitalized when it nominated a Milwaukee “sewer socialist” for governor.
