As the midterms near, Democrats are proposing adding more justices, limiting their terms and more.

One bill proposes increasing the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to 13. Another would cut their lifetime terms to 18 years. Others would create an enforceable ethics code and place standards on how the court rules from its relatively opaque “shadow docket.”

The latest wave of proposals to overhaul the Supreme Court have reached something of a fever pitch over the past few months, as Democrats grow increasingly frustrated with the court’s rightward turn. While the court blocked several of President Donald Trump’s key initiatives this past term, it also delivered significant conservative victories that pared back the 1965 Voting Rights Act, loosened campaign finance rules and increased presidential power.

Democrats’ anger is fueled by a conviction that many of these rulings are more about politics than the law.

“There’s constant and building dismay about the increasingly appalling record of the court,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), who recently introduced a term limits bill, said in an interview. “And I think the continuing interest in reform springs from continued dismay and concern about the court’s misbehavior.”

The pitches coincide with record levels of disapproval of how the Supreme Court is doing its job, as well as perceptions that the justices are ruling based on their ideology — a viewpoint largely embraced by liberals, according to a July Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

Those perceptions have only magnified as the justices have weighed in on issues that could directly affect the upcoming midterm elections. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) said Thursday that there are a “variety of different options that are on the table, and I think we can’t foreclose on any single one of them.”

Conservatives dismiss the proposals as efforts by liberals to intimidate and undermine a court that is not ruling the way they want.

“All of these ‘reforms’ are because the left doesn’t like the decisions coming out of the Court,” Mike Fragoso, a former chief counsel to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), said in an email. “The goal is to intimidate the Court into changing the course of decisions. It’s reprehensible.”

Liberals concede that the measures cannot succeed without Democrats solidly in control of Congress, and even then, only if the filibuster is eliminated — otherwise any proposal would require 60 votes in the Senate, which is highly unlikely.

Last month, Whitehouse and other Senate Democrats proposed a law that would limit justices’ terms to 18 years. Under that system, a president would nominate a justice every other year — a design intended maintain a measure of ideological balance on the bench.

Some advocates say specified terms also would lower the stakes of Supreme Court confirmation battles, since they would not be for lifetime appointments. These battles in recent years have become all-out, nasty and often personal.

“Even in a Congress like this one, where these bills have no chance of passage, it’s really important to file them and to stand by them, because they reassure people that there is in fact a mechanism by which the court could be restored to some degree of better order,” Whitehouse said.

Democrats in 2020 also offered a flurry of plans to overhaul the Supreme Court, angered that Trump was able to name three justices thanks to maneuvering by McConnell, who at that time was the Senate majority leader.

But President Joe Biden did not pursue those proposals. And the court’s solidified conservative majority has since overturned a string of precedents — including those guaranteeing the right to an abortion and upholding key parts of the Voting Rights Act — prompting fresh fury among liberals.

Congressional Democrats have introduced about a dozen proposals in recent months for revamping the court.

They call for expanding its size, requiring the justices to place certain assets into blind trusts, and creating standards for the court’s emergency docket, critically referred to as the “shadow docket.” In emergency docket cases, the justices have been criticized for ruling on consequential matters based on a limited record while offering relatively brief explanations for their decisions.

Democrats outside the Beltway are also pitching court reform. Former vice president Kamala Harris, whom some Democrats expect to run again for president in 2028, said at a recent event at that “we need to revisit” the notion of expanding the court to 13 justices.

James Talarico, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate against Republican Ken Paxton, has called for an “overhaul” of the Supreme Court, including term limits and a binding code of conduct. In an interview with TheGrio, Talarico described the court’s recent rulings on civil rights, including a recent decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act, as a “five-alarm fire.”

“Black Texans, Black Americans, have been ringing the alarm about the Supreme Court,” Talarico said. “And I think it’s time for all of us to realize the crisis that we face on the highest court in this country.”

Tom Jipping, a senior fellow at Advancing American Freedom, an advocacy organization founded by former vice president Mike Pence, argued that such criticisms only highlight Democrats’ fixation with results rather than the law, exposing their calls for reform as superficial.

“They never say how the Supreme Court got it wrong on the law,” Jipping said. “The only the thing they do is mention the result and tack on a few bombastic pejoratives.”

The court has regularly undergone periods of fierce scrutiny. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, conservatives complained bitterly that it was making up new liberal doctrines. Most notably, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, frustrated by the justices’ rejection of many elements of the New Deal, in 1937 proposed expanding the court, leading to pushback from Republicans as well as many fellow Democrats.

Still, some academics say the current Supreme Court faces real problems unrelated to its ideological composition.

The high court has turned into a political football in which justices on both sides are expected to vote along ideological lines on the most controversial issues, said Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University who has advocated for efforts to “depoliticize” the court.

Gone are the days of the “swing” justices like Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and Lewis F. Powell Jr., all Republican-appointed justices whose votes were less predictable when it came to hot-button issues such as affirmative action, abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, Epps noted.

“This is the first time where you have a court where the ideology really maps onto partisan affiliation,” Epps said.

Epps and Vanderbilt Law School professor Ganesh Sitaraman argued in a 2019 paper against popular proposals such as term limits and expanding the court’s size. They say both risk further politicizing the court.

Instead, Epps and Sitaraman have suggested a “lottery” model, in which cases would be decided by panels of justices selected randomly from a pool — similar to the way federal appeals courts decide cases.

They have also recommended a “balanced bench” structure, in which the court would be composed of an equal number of justices selected by Democrats and Republicans, with an additional judge selected from a lower court to break ties.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his colleagues have repeatedly said they issue rulings based on the law, not their political biases. But critics argue that the growing perception, among liberals at least, that the court is politically driven risks hurting its credibility in a way that could be damaging for the long term.

“The court only works as an institution if it is capable of deciding the hard cases in ways that seem credible to the country,” Epps said. “And if you have half the country that just sees the court as a partisan institution — and the court behaves in a way that seems largely consistent with that — half the country just can be like, ‘Screw these guys.’”