The Democratic Center Is Now as Radical as Its Left

By Noah Rothman

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

He was described as one of the Democratic Party’s most influential “moderates.” A “kingmaker” who saved Joe Biden’s career from the passions of the American far-left, and a temperate figure who “came out very publicly and very forcibly against” flights of fancy like “defund the police.”

 

These were just some of the broadsides Jim Clyburn leveled against the party’s progressive wing of his party. “Sometimes I have real problems trying to figure out what progressive means,” he said at the time. Well, the South Carolina congressman has since figured it out. Indeed, he has discovered a lot to like in what may be the far-left’s most radical policy preference: court-packing.

 

In an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Kristen lobbed a softball at Clyburn when she observed that former Vice President Kamala Harris supports expanding the number of justices on the court from nine to 13. Now, it should not be hard for any Democratic politician to distance themselves from one of Harris’s many half-baked ideas. Oddly, Clyburn endorsed Harris’s proposition instead.

 

“I think that we are in a position now that calls for some significant actions taken by the Congress,” he replied. “Thirteen is a pretty good number. A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the court.”

 

With that, the supposed sage of the Democratic Party’s moderate middle (of which Clyburn was never truly representative) has surrendered to possibly the most revolutionary position in the Democratic Socialists’ portfolio of competing radicalisms.

 

As Charlie Cooke has written persuasively again and again, a partisan effort to pack the court would be functionally indistinguishable from rendering Article III of the Constitution moot. “Post-packing, nothing that the Court said going forward would matter in the slightest, and, by extension, any attempts to enforce its prior rulings would be rendered impotent, too,” Cooke most recently observed. “In an instant, the entire history of American jurisprudence would be wiped out, and, with it, the Constitution as a going concern.”

 

Clyburn hasn’t gone as far as the DSA activists in that regard. They’re admirably frank about their contempt for the Constitution, what with its separation of powers and all those odious obstacles to government by capricious diktat. Clyburn isn’t there yet, but he probably will be eventually. After all, radical revolutionary fervor is all the rage these days.