Kamala Harris, the former vice president who lost the 2024 presidential election, posted a warning on X that President Donald Trump "must be stopped" from appointing as many as two more justices to the Supreme Court, framing the prospect as an existential threat even as her own party's track record of judicial alarmism keeps running into reality.
Harris shared a New York Times article and wrote on X:
"We must be clear eyed about what is at stake with the Supreme Court right now. We cannot allow Donald Trump to hand pick one, if not two, additional justices. The nation's highest court must be stopped from becoming even more beholden to him."
The language is worth pausing over. A former vice president, someone who swore an oath to the Constitution, is openly calling for a sitting president to be denied his constitutional authority to fill vacancies on the bench. Not because of any misconduct. Not because of any procedural violation. But because she does not like the direction the Court might go.
The New York Times report Harris amplified described a liberal organization preparing a multimillion-dollar effort to oppose potential Trump Supreme Court appointees before any vacancy even exists. Josh Orton, president of Demand Justice, told the Times the project would cost $3 million to start and $15 million more if vacancies occurred.
The Times report noted that Trump would most likely nominate a successor for Justice Clarence Thomas, 77, or Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., 76, if either seat opened. Democrats, the report added, would need to flip at least four Republican-held seats in the November elections to win Senate control, a steep climb that underscores how little institutional leverage the left currently holds.
That lack of leverage explains the tone. When you cannot win at the ballot box or in the chamber, you spend millions on pre-emptive opposition research and post alarming messages on social media. It is politics by panic.
President Biden himself laid the groundwork for this kind of rhetoric. As Newsmax reported, Biden said during the 2024 campaign that the next president was "likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees" and called the prospect of Trump filling those seats "one of the scariest parts" of a second Trump administration. Trump appointed three justices in his first term, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, and the decisions that followed, including Dobbs, the end of racial preferences in college admissions, and expanded Second Amendment protections, have driven Democratic frustration ever since.
Harris's post arrived against the backdrop of a recent report about Justice Alito's health. CNN reported that Alito had been taken to a hospital after becoming ill during an event on March 20, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
Patricia McCabe, a spokeswoman for the Supreme Court, offered a measured account. She said Alito felt ill during an event in Philadelphia on the evening of Friday, March 20, and that "out of an abundance of caution, he agreed with his security detail's recommendation to see a physician before the three-hour drive home." After an examination and the administration of fluids for dehydration, Alito returned home that night, as previously planned.
A 76-year-old man got dehydrated, saw a doctor, and went home. In a healthy political culture, that would be the end of it. Instead, it became fuel for a multimillion-dollar mobilization and a former vice president's call to arms on social media.
The left has long treated every Supreme Court development as a five-alarm fire, and the pattern says more about progressive politics than about the Court itself.
Democrats have spent years warning that the conservative Court was about to roll back one right after another. The predictions have a habit of not coming true. The Washington Free Beacon noted that Democratic politicians and allied media figures spent years insisting the Court was "hell-bent on making gay marriage illegal again." Then the Court denied Kim Davis's petition seeking to revisit Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision establishing a nationwide right to same-sex marriage, and the alarm turned out to be empty.
Overturning Obergefell would have required at least four justices to agree to hear the case, and no conservative justice besides Clarence Thomas had publicly called for revisiting the precedent. The gap between the rhetoric and the reality was wide enough to drive a truck through.
That episode did not stop the same playbook from running again. Every time the Court issues a ruling Democrats dislike, the fundraising emails go out, the cable news panels convene, and the warnings about the next catastrophe begin. Harris's post fits neatly into that cycle.
Strip away the dramatic language and Harris's message is straightforward: she believes a president elected by the American people should not exercise one of his clearest constitutional duties because she disagrees with the kind of justices he would choose.
Article II of the Constitution gives the president the power to nominate justices. The Senate provides advice and consent. That process has worked, sometimes contentiously, for more than two centuries. Harris is not proposing a better process. She is proposing that the process be blocked for political reasons.
The broader legal battles between Trump and his opponents have already shown that the Court takes its work seriously, hearing arguments and issuing rulings without regard to which side screams loudest on social media. That independence is exactly what Harris's framing seeks to undermine.
Demand Justice's $3 million startup budget and potential $15 million war chest are not about protecting the Court. They are about pressuring it. When a well-funded advocacy group builds an opposition campaign before a vacancy even opens, the goal is not deliberation, it is obstruction dressed up as civic engagement.
And Harris, who once sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, knows the difference. Her choice to frame a lawful presidential power as something that "must be stopped" is a deliberate escalation, one aimed at energizing a base that has grown accustomed to treating every Trump action as an emergency.
If a vacancy does arise on the Supreme Court, the president will nominate a replacement and the Senate will vote. That is how the system works. Harris lost her chance to shape that process when she lost the 2024 election.
What she is doing now, rallying opposition to a nomination that does not yet exist, against a vacancy that has not yet occurred, on the basis of a dehydration episode that ended with a justice going home the same night, is not principled opposition. It is pre-emptive obstruction built on speculation and funded by millions in activist dollars.
Voters chose the president who gets to make these picks. That is the part of the process Harris keeps leaving out.
