Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse charged that the Biden administration completely chickened out on Supreme Court reform, muffling critics and leaving progressive demands for a remade high court unmet.
Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse told The Lever that former President Joe Biden’s team was “highly reluctant” to confront what he called problems at the Supreme Court and “completely chickened out” rather than press structural change.
Fox News reported the remarks from Whitehouse’s October 14, 2026, interview with Lever host David Sirota, in which the senator framed Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court as a weak response that blocked stronger criticism from reaching the final report.
Whitehouse has long pushed Supreme Court ethics legislation and has argued the court was captured by “right-wing billionaires and special interests.” In the interview he cast the Biden years as a missed chance to make that case from the White House bully pulpit.
He tied the failure directly to how the commission handled dissenting voices inside it.
Whitehouse said the chief executive should have used the office to tell the public what had “gone wrong with the courts.” He said Biden’s people wanted no part of that fight.
"Well, I think it starts with truth telling and I think the chief executive of the United States has the proverbial bully, the bulliest of all pulpits, and should be prepared to make the argument about what has gone wrong with the courts. The Biden administration was highly reluctant to do that. They completely chickened out. Biden set up that lame committee commission on the Supreme Court and then squelched both Judge Gertner and Professor Tribe when they wanted to describe some of the actual problems at the court so that they couldn't even get that into the report,"
Whitehouse said.
He repeated the charge in plain terms.
"The Biden people didn't want to go there. They were completely chicken about all that. They wanted no part of that. And it, really wasn't until the very end, in his last speech after he and Harris had both lost that Biden seemed to have at least somewhat awakened to the fact that the Supreme Court had a real integrity problem."
Whitehouse said.
Biden’s office did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
The commission itself took no position on adding more justices. Two of its 34 members, former Judge Nancy Gertner and Professor Laurence Tribe, later broke publicly with that silence.
In a December 2021 Washington Post op-ed, Gertner and Tribe wrote that Congress needed to enlarge the court and do it quickly.
"We now believe that Congress must expand the size of the Supreme Court and do so as soon as possible. We did not come to this conclusion lightly."
They stated.
Whitehouse now claims the Biden White House kept those sharper critiques out of the official commission product. The record in the reporting shows the commission declined to endorse expansion; the op-ed came afterward from two members who wanted a different outcome.
That sequence matters. A presidential panel produced no recommendation to pack the court. Two members then went outside the process to demand seats be added. Whitehouse treats the gap as proof of political fear inside the Biden operation.
The same Wednesday Whitehouse spoke to The Lever, former Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on the “Baby, This is Keke Palmer” podcast and again floated expanding the Supreme Court.
"The work that we can do about winning back the House and the Senate is going to be on a number of things. For example, I believe that we need to expand the Supreme Court. We need more justices on the Supreme Court so that we can have a court that actually reinforces the spirit and principles behind the Constitution of the United States,"
Harris said.
She also said Democrats should push “what is possible around changing the Electoral College” and pursue statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
Days later, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, her 2024 running mate, warned of a reckoning inside the party if Democrats regain Congress and possibly the presidency in 2028 and then fail to deliver structural change.
The pattern is familiar. When Democrats lose under the existing rules, some turn to rewriting the institutions themselves, more justices, altered electors, new states. Whitehouse’s complaint is that Biden would not lead that charge while in office.
Northwestern adjunct law professor Andrew Stoltmann told Fox News Digital the practical odds of Democrats remaking the court are near zero.
"The odds of Democrats changing the composition of the Supreme Court through a constitutional amendment are near zero, while changing it via statutory legislation (such as expanding the number of seats or imposing term limits) would be extraordinarily difficult. It is a pipe dream. A fantasy. It’s nothing more than something to get their base excited about,"
Stoltmann said.
He spelled out the amendment math: two-thirds of both the House and Senate, then ratification by three-fourths of the states, 38 of 50 legislatures. In a polarized country, he called the idea “almost silly” as a realistic plan.
"A constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, followed by ratification by three-fourths (38 of 50) of state legislatures. Given the deep divides, politically, this is almost impossible. It’s almost silly for Democrats to be arguing that this is a realistic possibility."
Stoltmann said.
Statutory court-packing would still need Congress and a president willing to blow up a norm that has held the court’s size steady for generations. Biden’s commission did not clear that path. Harris is still selling the idea to podcast listeners. Whitehouse is angry the earlier White House would not.
Taxpayers and lawful citizens who rely on stable constitutional rules watch the same cycle: progressive activists demand more seats when rulings go against them, party leaders float the idea to fire up the base, and the hard numbers on amendments and legislation remain unchanged.
Whitehouse wants “truth telling” from a Democratic president about the courts. What the public actually heard was a commission that refused to endorse packing, two members who went to the op-ed page instead, a former vice president still pitching expansion after electoral defeat, and a senator now calling his own side chicken for not going further.
Court packing remains a political slogan, not a governing plan, and the Constitution’s high bars exist for a reason.
