Rep. Sean Casten

Whether that was expanding the franchise to women, to minorities, to Native Americans, direct election of senators.

The most anti-democratic institutions in the United States are still the ones that hold us back.

The Senate, the Electoral College, and the structure of the Supreme Court.

The Senate sort of has a self-destruct button that Article 5 of the Constitution says that you're not even allowed to amend the Constitution in a way that would reduce the proportional power of the states.

because I think our founders understood how deeply anti-democratic the Senate was and what the problem is.

We've introduced a bill to get around that in a sort of a sideways way by saying, let's create 12 nationally elected at-large senators so that the Senate would actually have a significant block of senators who had to be responsive to national public will as a way to fix that.

The Supreme Court, I think on any objective analysis,

has always been political and has always been lowercase c conservative.

I mean, with the exception of the Warren Court, they have always protected the power of incumbents over expansions of democracy.

And there's nothing particularly wrong with them being political, other than the fact that they tell themselves a story that they are just gods on high who live in a temple and dispense wisdom.

And they're not political actors, and yet we all know they are.

And so we've introduced some legislation that would basically take advantage of the fact that Article 3 of the Constitution specifically says that the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court

is limited to disputes between the states, admiralty law, maritime law, matters related to ambassadors, and such appellate jurisdiction as the Congress provides.

So Congress has the ability, if we choose, to strip all appellate jurisdiction from the Supreme Court.

And so what we've done is introduced legislation that would say the senior appellate court would now be a separate court, and judges would be randomly assigned from the

70 or 80 senior circuit court judges so that you couldn't choose your docket, right?

And that would go through to set that case so that we would actually have, you wouldn't have a way to politicize the court and do that.

We can do that.

And I, for one, think that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are really good at maritime law and admiralty law, and they could continue to do that.

Matters related to ambassadors, fine, you can have your lifetime appointment.