The WSJ editorial page is laundering the Roberts Court’s record as President Trump’s subsidiary behind three cherry-picked poll numbers. The evidence on offer is the August Marquette Law School poll of 1,076 adults, which supposedly proves the majority is not the subsidiary of President Trump’s MAGA project that Hakeem Jeffries describes. The real target of the exercise is not the poll but the instrument: the Supreme Court Term Limits and Regular Appointments Act, the centerpiece of the “dramatic Supreme Court reform” Mr. Jeffries is advancing. A page that calls him a fabulist might be expected to answer the bill’s argument. It answers with percentages instead.
The bill’s best case deserves to be stated before it is audited. Article III, Section 1 guarantees the justices their offices “during good Behaviour” — life tenure unless removed for misconduct. It does not set the size of the Court, and it does not set the length of a justice’s active service. The nine seats are the product of the Judiciary Act of 1869, not of the constitutional text. The term-limits bill is prospective: eighteen years on the active docket, one new appointment every two years, senior status at the end of the term — the semi-retired posture the lower federal courts have used for a century. A justice appointed under the bill would serve a fixed term fully protected from political removal and then step back, the guarantee honored. The democratic case is the honest part: a regular appointment rhythm drains the stakes from any single confirmation, flattens the confirmation wars, and reconnects the Court’s composition to the country’s electoral timeline without removing a single sitting justice. The strongest argument against — and it is a real one — is that lifetime tenure is what lets a Court tell a President no. A fixed term makes its final years a lame-duck span, and a justice looking ahead to senior status is a justice who can be outlasted. That is a genuine contest among working constitutional lawyers. The editorial could have fought it there. It chose a poll instead.
The doctrine constrains more than the panic admits and less than the reform’s opponents pretend. Congress cannot strip the Court’s original jurisdiction — the cases involving ambassadors and the states sit in Article III itself. But the appellate jurisdiction, which is nearly the whole of the modern docket, is subject to “such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.” In plain English, Congress decides what the Court hears on appeal. Congress has exercised that power across the Court’s whole history: it re-made the judiciary in 1801 and un-made it in 1802; it shrank the Court to seven in 1866 to deny Andrew Johnson his vacancies; it restored nine in 1869. The Court that claimed judicial review in Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803), did so from a bench Congress had already re-sized — and would re-size again. The one dramatic reform that failed, the 1937 court-packing plan, failed because it was retroactive, transparent, and aimed at the sitting justices. The term-limits bill is none of those. It touches no current member. The constitutional question it presents is whether “good Behaviour” is a floor that a prospective fixed term honors or a ceiling that only death, resignation, or impeachment may breach. The Court has never decided it, and the institutional history points toward the floor.
Read honestly, the poll tests the reform’s premises. The three rulings where the Court slapped down Mr. Trump were popular, yes. Learning Resources v. Trump on tariffs: 66% to 34%. Trump v. Barbara on birthright citizenship: 63% to 37%. Trump v. Cook on the President’s attempt to fire a Federal Reserve governor: 70% to 30%. Congratulations to the Justices for getting the easy ones right. Now look at the rest.
West Virginia v. B.P.J., blessing state laws that bar transgender athletes from girls’ sports: 65% in the poll — a number that flatters the majority until one notices how the question was framed. U.S. v. Hemani, reading the Second Amendment to strike down a federal ban on gun possession by marijuana users: 61%. Louisiana v. Callais, pulling race out of redistricting: 53%. A country being marched in step with the Court is not the same thing as a Court in step with the country.
Then there is the figure the page slides past. Asked how often the Justices have ruled in Mr. Trump’s favor in his second term, 12% of respondents said “almost always,” and 43% said “most of the time.” That is 55% of the country looking at the docket and seeing exactly what Mr. Jeffries is describing. The page explains this perception by blaming Democrats for repeating it. Perhaps. Or perhaps the Justices keep earning it.
Justice Elena Kagan has “publicly corrected” Mr. Jeffries’s “mistaken impression,” the page reminds us. Worth noticing what Justice Kagan actually corrected: the impression, not the record. Three losses for the President, on marquee cases that turned on text and structure. But the larger project — the demolition of the administrative state, the reordering of civil rights law, the arming of the executive against independent agencies — those are not losses. Those are the working weeks of a Court that knows what it is doing.
The closing caveats are familiar: 33% of Americans have “never heard of” Chief Justice John Roberts, and survey results “always have to be taken for what they’re worth.” The translation is unflattering. When the public registers an opinion, it is mistaken; when it has not registered one, the case is unproven. By that logic, no level of public disapproval could ever justify reform.
The deeper error is treating the poll as the constitutional battleground at all. The term-limits bill does not rest on the Marquette numbers. It rests on Article III, on the Exceptions Clause, and on two centuries of congressional practice over the Court’s structure. The poll is corroboration, not argument: 55% of the country sees a Court that rules for the President “most of the time” or “almost always,” and the confirmation wars have made the Court’s composition a standing political wound. The editorial’s claim is that public approval makes the reform illegitimate. But the 55% figure is the public registering the very condition the reform addresses. The page cannot answer the docket, so it answers with the poll. The poll, read honestly, answers back with the docket.
Mr. Jeffries is right that the Court needs reform. He is right that the majority is operating as the subsidiary of one party’s project. He is right that the docket tells the story the page does not want told. The Marquette poll, read honestly, is the most recent confirmation. What that page calls a smear is, in fact, a description — and the description names the instrument the page is afraid to debate.