Democrat Troy Jackson told Mainers he's open to packing the Supreme Court with more justices — a direct threat to the last branch of government that still occasionally sides with the Constitution over the administrative state.
Jackson, challenging Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in November, made the remark during Thursday's Senate debate, saying the court "obviously is not working" and that he's "not against putting more people on the court." He framed the current bench as a tool of the wealthy: "It's working at the pass of the Donald Trump and the billionaire class. I mean, that's who's actually funding people like Thomas and Alito."
Jackson also backed term limits and stricter ethics rules, claiming justices are "taking trips" and "taking gifts from people that are going to come before them." He invoked the Founders to justify his position: "This is not, I don't think what our founding fathers expected whenever they set up you know this system."
Collins pushed back, defending the court's independence: "What we want is a Supreme Court that is insulated from politics. That was the whole idea of the judicial system." She called adding seats an affront to the Founders' vision: "To try to pack the court by increasing the numbers goes completely against the vision of those who wrote the Constitution."
Collins noted she voted to confirm three liberal justices — Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — arguing that's how the system is supposed to work, not by restructuring the court whenever you don't like the rulings. "They don't want the Supreme Court to be like Congress," she said.
The Constitution doesn't specify the number of justices. Congress set it at six in 1789, and the size shifted several times before landing at nine in 1869. That history is now the left's pretext: if Congress changed it before, Congress can change it again. What they leave out is that every prior change was driven by raw partisan maneuvering — and the 1869 settlement was meant to end exactly that.
Breitbart framed the exchange squarely around Jackson's court-packing openness and Collins' rebuttal. The New York Post buried the court-packing exchange entirely, instead leading on a heckler who interrupted the debate to shout about AI data centers "poisoning our water." The Post gave more ink to Jackson telling Collins to "shut up" over a protester than to his endorsement of dismantling the judiciary.
Here's the open question: Collins defended the constitutional order on a debate stage — but where's the rest of the Republican Party? Court-packing is the left's playbook for neutralizing the one institution that can still check federal overreach. If the GOP treats this as a Maine problem instead of a constitutional one, they're telegraphing they won't fight it when it matters.
