Hakeem Jeffries posted a photo of himself holding a baseball bat and called the Supreme Court a subsidiary of the MAGA Republican Party.
That was this week – and he was just getting started.
Now he's put his threat to the court on the record, and one legal expert says America needs to take him at his word.
Jeffries Calls for Supreme Court Overhaul if Democrats Win the House
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has a problem.
The Democrat Socialists surging through his party's primaries don't think he's radical enough. Far-left candidates knocked off establishment Democrats in Minnesota and came within a hair of doing it in Wisconsin.
Now Jeffries is sprinting to stay in front of a mob he can no longer control.
So this week he made them a promise about the Supreme Court.
"There's a variety of different options that are on the table, and I think that we can't foreclose any single one of them," Jeffries declared.
He called the current court – the same court that has ruled both for and against Trump on major cases – a "conservative, right-wing majority" that "has become basically a subsidiary of the MAGA Republican Party."
His plan: pack it with hard-left justices, impose term limits to push sitting justices out, or gut the institution's structure entirely – whatever it takes to hand Democrats a friendly bench.
The only thing missing from Jeffries' pitch was a timeline – because he's already given one of those: the moment Democrats make him Speaker of the House.
Jonathan Turley Says Court Packing Is About One Thing
George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley has been in the middle of the most consequential legal battles of the modern era. His read on what Jeffries is doing comes down to three words.
"It is simply about power," Turley wrote Thursday.
He noted that former Attorney General Eric Holder made the same calculation explicit: the goal is the "acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028."
Turley also flagged what nobody in the press wants to say out loud – the Democrat-appointed justices currently sitting on the court have themselves rejected Jeffries' framing.
They've reminded Americans that the court has handed the Trump administration significant losses. The "subsidiary of MAGA" claim isn't just inflammatory – it's a charge the court's own left-wing justices won't back up.
The polling is just as damaging for Jeffries. Most Americans oppose court packing and want the bench to stay at nine justices. None of that matters to Hakeem Jeffries – because his audience right now isn't most Americans.
It's the socialist wing of his party deciding whether to primary him in 2028.
Jeffries and the 2026 Midterms: A Pattern Democrats Should Worry About
Jeffries posted a photo of himself holding a baseball bat on social media this summer, vowing to fight Trump's agenda. Conservatives mocked it as awkward theater. One Republican strategist called him "the worst congressional leader in modern history."
https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1940471900087738462
But Turley sees something the mockery missed.
The bat wasn't aimed at Republicans. It was aimed at the mob demanding Jeffries prove himself.
With Democrat Socialists at his own rallies chanting that he could be next, Jeffries is out there performing for a crowd that still isn't impressed.
"Jeffries has struggled to pander to the mob to secure power in the midterm elections," Turley wrote, "including brandishing a baseball bat on social media to show his radical bona fides."
America has seen this play before. In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court after it blocked pieces of his New Deal agenda. A Democrat-controlled Congress rejected FDR's plan 70-20 – calling it "needless, futile, and utterly dangerous."
Even the late left-wing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said court packing was a bad idea in 1937 and remained a bad idea decades later, warning that adding justices would make the court look "partisan."
Today's Democrats have learned nothing. Senator Elizabeth Warren wants court expansion because the court won't rubber-stamp her agenda. Across the country, Democrat candidates are running on adding justices and ending lifetime tenure – the full demolition job, just dressed up in legal language.
Hakeem Jeffries and his party are trying to "ride a rage wave into power" – and the Supreme Court is what they've decided to ride it over.
Sources:
- Jonathan Turley, "Rage Politics: Hakeem Jeffries Will Take a Baseball Bat to the Supreme Court," jonathanturley.org, August 14, 2026.
- "Jeffries Welcomes Democratic Socialists Into the Fold," Fox News, June 27, 2026.
- "SWING AND A MISS! 'Low Energy' Hakeem Jeffries ROASTED for Baseball Bat Pic," Hannity.com, July 3, 2025.
- Chuck Grassley, "Democrats Revive FDR Court-Packing Scheme to Rig the Supreme Court," The Federalist, June 25, 2026.
- "Campaigning Democrats Amplify Calls to Overhaul Supreme Court," Washington Times, July 8, 2026.
