Courts in Crisis Forum

Demand Justice hosted an array of the country’s most prominent, progressive activists and thinkers at a forum in Washington, DC to make the case for reforming the Supreme Court in the wake of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle.

While the participants voiced support for different reform proposals, a clear consensus emerged: the Roberts Court’s conservative majority has politicized the Court as an institution, and progressives must be willing to consider bold steps to restore the Court’s legitimacy.

“This is a meeting of first responders. Our democracy continues to be on fire. But I’ll tell you, the silver lining of this President has been that it has awakened our democracy in ways that I’ve never seen in my lifetime,” said Tom Perez, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. “And now we have to sustain it, but we have to sustain it in a way that has voters understanding the importance of the issues you’re about to discuss because if you don’t have access to courts, you don’t have access to justice.”

“The first thing we ought to do as progressives [is] talk about taking power away from an elitist institution that is anti-democratic and restoring that power to the people and bringing independence to the Court again, instead of politicization,” said U.S. Representative Ro Khanna. “I believe very much that we need reform of our court and we have to make sure that it does not become an institution that strikes down populist policies, but I think we ought to talk about it in a way that is consistent with our jurisprudence, and our history, and our Constitution.”