Atlanta (AP) —Former vice president and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris spoke at an NAACP forum in Atlanta on Thursday. Harris said the U.S. Supreme Court should be enlarged to 13 justices from the current nine. It was among several ideas Harris suggested as “structural work” to improve U.S. democracy.
“There are 13 circuit courts. There should be 13 justices,” Harris said, referring to the appellate courts that come between federal trial courts and the Supreme Court that has the final say over questions of federal law.
Harris, who lost to Trump in the 2024 election, also said the U.S. said the Electoral College should be revisited, though she offered no details.
She added her endorsement to grant Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., full statehood, a move that would add four seats to the U.S. Senate.
And she called for the Senate Judiciary Committee to start holding federal judicial nominees in contempt if they are found to have lied during their confirmation hearings.
At NAACP forum in Georgia, Kamala Harris says Tuesday’s election is the next step to stop Trump
Harris also said she’s optimistic the midterm elections can shift the country’s direction.
“The founders of our nation expected that if faced with a tyrant in the highest office in the land that we would activate a co-equal branch of government, in this case Congress, to be a check,” Harris said on stage at Atlanta’s Elizabeth Baptist Church.
She called Trump’s second presidency “the most callous, corrupt and incompetent presidential administration in the history of America” but said voters have the power to stop.
Harris and NAACP President Derrick Johnson praised early voting turnout in Georgia and elsewhere that suggest a surge among Black voters, Latino voters and young voters.
Harris is in the first of her two-day swing in Georgia, the final stop of her midterm campaign circuit that took her from her to at least seven states.