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By usurping and second-guessing Congress's judgment so often and so enthusiastically in a particular direction, the Roberts court no longer resembles a judicial body as much as it resembles the old House of Lords that used to dominate British politics. Our cousins across the Atlantic finally remedied the problem in 1911 by compelling the lords to accept strong limits on their own power"not through persuasion, but by threatening to pack the lords with as many new dukes and earls as would be necessary to break the aristocratic grip on democratic governance.

If Democrats retake the White House and both chambers of Congress at some point in the future, they should not make that same threat"they should simply do it. The Roberts court has spent the last 20 years dismantling liberal democracy as Americans have known it. Its rulings have paved the way for the first quasi-dictatorship in the republic's history. Congress should add as many justices to the Supreme Court as it takes to produce a bench that believes in basic American values once more: self-government, civic virtue, and the rule of law