Former Vice President Kamala Harris is fundraising against Supreme Court nominees who do not yet exist. In a post on X, Harris urged supporters to help a liberal dark-money group build a multimillion-dollar operation aimed at opposing any justices President Donald Trump might appoint, before a single vacancy has opened.
The effort, organized by the group Demand Justice and its president Josh Orton, would cost an estimated $3 million to launch and $15 million more if vacancies materialize. Harris shared a New York Times article describing the campaign and added her own appeal, as Jonathan Turley detailed in his analysis for Fox News.
Harris wrote on X:
"We must be clear eyed about what is at stake with the Supreme Court right now. We cannot allow Donald Trump to hand pick one, if not two, additional justices. The nation's highest court must be stopped from becoming even more beholden to him."
No justice has announced retirement. No vacancy has been declared. No nomination is pending. Harris is raising money against a hypothetical, and asking donors to treat it as an emergency.
Demand Justice is not new to hardball judicial politics. The group previously ran a pressure campaign to push Justice Stephen Breyer into retirement, clearing the way for President Biden to nominate his replacement. That campaign succeeded. Breyer stepped down, and Biden appointed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Now the same organization has turned its sights on the other side of the bench. Turley noted that the group expressly cited the possibility that Justice Clarence Thomas, 77, or Justice Samuel Alito, 76, could retire during the Trump presidency. The preemptive fundraising operation is designed to be ready to fight any Trump nominee the moment a seat opens.
The recent spotlight on Justice Alito's health and the group's $15 million war chest only underscores how seriously the left is treating Supreme Court succession as a political battlefield.
Orton described the projected costs plainly: $3 million to stand up the operation, $15 million more if vacancies actually occur. That is $18 million in potential spending aimed not at a specific nominee's record but at the general principle that Trump should not be allowed to shape the Court.
Harris's fundraising push does not exist in a vacuum. It sits alongside a broader Democratic effort to delegitimize the current Court and, if possible, restructure it entirely. Democratic strategist James Carville laid out the long game during an episode of his podcast on a recent Thursday.
Carville told listeners:
"I'm going to tell you what's going to happen. A Democrat is going to be elected in 2028. You know that. I know that. The Democratic president is going to announce a special transition advisory committee on the reform of the Supreme Court."
He continued:
"They're going to recommend that the number of Supreme Court justices go from nine to 13. That's going to happen, people."
Carville's confidence is notable. He is not floating a trial balloon. He is describing what he considers an inevitability, expanding the Court from nine justices to thirteen the moment Democrats hold the White House again. That kind of talk used to be fringe. It is now mainstream Democratic strategy, spoken openly on a popular podcast.
Harvard professor Michael Klarman went even further years ago, laying out an agenda to reshape the political system and then acknowledging the obstacle: "the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described." His solution was to neutralize the Court itself. Klarman also predicted Republicans "will never win another election" once Democrats enacted their program, a candid admission that the goal is not judicial reform but permanent political advantage.
The broader pattern of heated Democratic reactions to Trump's relationship with the Supreme Court shows how deep the institutional frustration runs on the left.
Consider what Harris is actually asking donors to fund. She is not opposing a nominee. She is not challenging a judicial philosophy. She is asking people to write checks against the constitutional authority of a sitting president to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court, vacancies that have not occurred.
The Constitution gives the president the power to nominate justices, with the advice and consent of the Senate. That process has operated for more than two centuries. Harris's framing, that the Court "must be stopped from becoming even more beholden to him", treats a routine constitutional function as a threat to be defeated before it begins.
This is the same Kamala Harris who, as a senator, participated in confirmation hearings and voted on judicial nominees. She understands the process. She is not arguing it is broken. She is arguing that the wrong person holds the power, and therefore the power itself must be resisted.
Meanwhile, the current Court has been the site of genuine constitutional clashes under the Trump administration, including high-stakes oral arguments over the president's birthright citizenship executive order. The justices are doing their jobs. The left's objection is to the outcomes.
Turley also flagged a related episode that received less attention. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the only Biden nominee on the current bench, publicly praised Harris's 2024 presidential nomination on ABC's The View, calling it "historic" and saying it "gives a lot of people hope."
A sitting Supreme Court justice offering public praise for a presidential candidate raises its own set of questions. Justices are expected to maintain at least the appearance of political neutrality. Jackson's comments came during the campaign season, and they aligned neatly with the political interests of the party that put her on the bench.
The consequences of how judicial appointments become politicized are visible across the federal bench. Questions about the downstream effects of confirmation politics on sentencing and judicial conduct are not abstract, they shape real cases and real outcomes.
Demand Justice's $18 million budget is not a legal defense fund. It is not a policy shop. It is an opposition-research and media-pressure machine designed to make any Trump nominee politically toxic before the Senate even schedules a hearing.
The group operated the same way during the Breyer retirement push. It applied public pressure on a sitting justice to leave the bench on a political timetable. It worked. Now the model is being applied in reverse, not to create a vacancy but to ensure that when one arises, the confirmation fight is already lost in the court of public opinion.
Harris's involvement lends the effort a level of visibility and credibility it would not otherwise have. A former vice president and recent presidential nominee directing her donor network toward a dark-money judicial group is not grassroots activism. It is institutional power deployed to obstruct a constitutional process.
The administration has already faced frustrations tied to Supreme Court setbacks, and the left's preemptive mobilization suggests they expect the stakes to rise further.
The nine-justice Supreme Court has been the standard since 1869. Court packing, expanding the bench to dilute the influence of justices you dislike, was rejected even when Franklin Roosevelt tried it at the height of his popularity. Democrats who now treat it as a foregone conclusion are not defending norms. They are preparing to shatter one of the most durable structural norms in American government.
Harris's fundraising pitch, Carville's podcast predictions, Klarman's academic blueprints, and Demand Justice's war chest all point in the same direction. The left is not content to win elections and appoint justices through the existing process. It wants to change the process itself, and it wants donors to pay for the groundwork now.
The question is not whether Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito will retire. The question is whether the American public will accept a political movement that treats the constitutional appointment power of a duly elected president as something to be preemptively defeated with dark money and media campaigns.
When you are raising millions to fight a nominee who does not exist, the target is not the nominee. It is the institution.
