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Sorry, Kamala: ‘No bad ideas’ is a uniquely bad idea

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by Jonathan Turley, opinion contributor - 05/16/26 10:00 AM ET

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by Jonathan Turley, opinion contributor - 05/16/26 10:00 AM ET

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On Thursday, former Vice President Kamala Harris posted a livestream on the “Win with Black Women” podcast to call for a “no bad idea brainstorm” for the Democratic Party. She used that pretense to “throw out there” the idea that Democrats should make radical constitutional and political changes as soon as they retake power.

That includes packing the Supreme Court, admitting Puerto Rico and D.C. as states and killing the Electoral College.

All of these items have been previously raised by liberal professors and pundits as a way to circumvent small-D democratic processes in order to guarantee power for the big-D Democrats for years to come.

It was a telling rationalization. The Democratic Party has become a party of moral and political relativism, embodied in the popular “by any means necessary” mantra used by many on the left today.

But there are bad ideas, just as there are bad people who want to win at any cost.

For some, Harris herself showed the existence of truly bad ideas by accepting the position as Biden’s Border Czar as roughly ten million people poured into the country. Another bad idea was her selection of Tim Walz as a running mate before his series of rake-steps.

Indeed, her sudden surprise nomination was a bad idea, one that cost $1.5 billion in just 15 weeks and led to one of her party’s most crushing losses in decades.

The worst idea, however, is to celebrate our 250th anniversary by destroying the very institutions and values that created the most successful and stable democracy in history.

In my book “Rage and the Republic,” I discuss lawyers and law professors who rationalize the trashing of the Constitution and our institutions to achieve their political goals. I debated one Harvard law professor who rattled off a list of Democratic proposals for our system, but then added that the left would need first to take control of the Supreme Court. It was an acknowledgment that the court would likely declare some or all of the proposals unconstitutional.

I previously wrote about the rise of “the new Jacobins” — influential figures who are seeking to dismantle our system after facing judicial and political setbacks. Even the dean of Berkeley Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky, wrote a book titled “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”

Now, leading Democrats such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have declared the Supreme Court “illegitimate” and called for a “massive” overhaul of both state and federal courts to make them submit to Democrats’ demands. This was Jeffries’ reaction to the Virginia Supreme Court’s rejection of Democrats’ effort to wipe out Republican representation in Virginia.

He is not the only one adding bad ideas to Harris’s wish list. Various politicians and pundits called for the sacking and packing of the Virginia Supreme Court. By lowering the mandatory age for retirement to 54, they would simply force out all of the current justices and replace them with rubber-stamp liberal appointees.

If this sack-and-pack scheme is not enough, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, reminded citizens that, under the state constitution, they could scrap the entire Virginia government over the refusal to let Democrats gerrymander the state. (Elias is infamous for his role in the secret funding of the Steele Dossier to launch the debunked Russian collusion scandal).

It did not matter that even a justice appointed by former Democratic governor Mark Warner found the move unconstitutional, or that Democratic figures like Gov. Abigail Spanberger believed that it could be overturned.

The X posting was only the latest effort to throw out some “bad ideas” to an increasingly radical movement on the left.

When I and others flagged Elias’s posting as alarming, he criticized me for taking him to task for merely quoting the state Constitution. It was typical of the “Who, me?” response of establishment figures when confronted for pandering to the most radical political elements in the Democratic Party.

It is like responding to an adverse World Trade Organization trade ruling by invoking Congress’s power to declare war. It is a rather extreme reaction.

Yet, it is all part of the effort to normalize extreme measures and condition American voters to fundamentally changing our system. Harris calls it her “expanded playbook.”

Former Attorney General Eric Holder, i