Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., said that Democrats should not prioritize impeaching President Donald Trump if they win control of the House in the upcoming midterm elections, but instead should focus on making life more affordable
Page A6From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 August 2026
Clyburn Calls For Expanding Supreme Court To 13 Seats, Says Impeaching Trump Shouldn't Be A Priority
As it ran on the front
Jim Clyburn had two thoughts this week and they don't sit together the way he probably wants them to. Thought one: the Supreme Court should have thirteen seats instead of nine, and thirteen, in his words, is a pretty good number. Thought two: if Democrats win back the House, impeaching the president shouldn't be the priority.
Sit with the size of the gap between those two positions. Expanding the Supreme Court is not a small ask. It is a structural rewrite of a branch of government that has run on nine seats for generations, floated here as a comfortable, almost breezy suggestion — a pretty good number, like picking a jersey size. Meanwhile, using the existing, constitutionally spelled-out tool for holding a sitting president accountable gets filed under 'not the priority,' something to be managed, deprioritized, put behind whatever the actual agenda turns out to be.…
…(cont) That's backwards from how a party in the minority usually plays it. The big swing — adding seats to reshape a court for a generation — is the one you'd expect leadership to hedge on, to float carefully, to test in the room before saying out loud. The accountability mechanism that already exists, that requires no new legislation, no new seats, no rewriting of anything — that's the one you'd expect the caution to attach to only if you'd already decided you weren't going to use it, and wanted the low-energy version of that decision on the record early, before anyone asked you to promise otherwise.
None of this requires guessing at what's in Clyburn's head. He said both things, in public, in the same stretch of news cycle, and they were reported by different desks as if they were two separate stories about two separate topics. They're the same story. It's about which powers a party is willing to spend political capital pursuing and which ones it would rather not be asked about come election season, because an impeachment vote costs something at the ballot box and a floated, theoretical, someday court expansion costs nothing today.
The court still has nine seats. The president is still not impeached, and won't be a priority if the same voice keeps setting the agenda. Whichever one of those two facts changes first will tell you which of this week's two sentences Clyburn actually meant.
“Same congressman, same week: pack the court, sure, that's on the table, but hold off on impeachment, that's a bridge too far. When the ambitious idea is expanding a nine-seat institution and the cautious idea is holding a president accountable, you've got your priorities upside down, and so does the leadership.”
“Congressman Clyburn is simply floating structural reform, that's healthy debate about the judiciary — and keeping impeachment off the table is just strategic focus, not letting one issue swallow an entire majority's agenda, that's just governing, that's not avoiding anything, why would that be avoiding anything.”
The receipts
Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) on Sunday called for an expansion of the Supreme Court's nine justices to 13, calling that increase a "pretty good number." "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker asked Clyburn if he agreed with former Vice…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.