An At Best Half-Baked Theory of How the Calcification of American Political Institutions Mirrors Professional Sports

The Supreme Court’s makeup shifted in size six times before it settled at nine — in 1869. The last meaningful attempt to change that number was with FDR in 1937; the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill didn’t even make it out of committee. A single Constitutional amendment — the 27th, first proposed in 1789 governing Congressional compensation, ratified in 1992 — has been added in more than half a century.

Like those rims and end zones and first base lines, the rules of the country are calcified, assumed to be sacrosanct though in many cases largely arbitrary or at best outdated. And the longer you let the numbers sit, the harder the stone around them becomes — it’s 435 Members because it just is, that’s simply How Things Are. Packing the court, an obvious and necessary path out from under a SCOTUS that has abandoned all pretense of high-minded impartiality in favor of bestowing tyrant-like powers on one mentally declining grifter, is sneered at as somehow unholy, a knock at the centuries of supposedly infallible jurisprudence. We like our numbers, be they 60 feet-six inches or nine Justices, too much to meaningfully ponder their adjustment.

But here’s the thing: In sports, there are indications that fever has started to break. Though our major leagues have always dabbled with some innovation — the addition of the three-point line in 1979, or its brief shortening in the mid-90s, say, or the advent of interleague play for baseball — but in general the Yankees game you could watch in 1956 wasn’t all that far off from the one in 1998. But now: a pitch clock speeding up games; a cursed extra innings runner; a mid-season NBA tournament (oil-soaked cash grab it may be), meant to mirror European soccer leagues; and so on. For a few decades — really the first of the internet, when we could all look up the stats and marvel at the home runs and ERAs and assists and rebounds and so on as compared to, say, Ty Cobb and Oscar Robertson — we seemed to think messing with the parameters was as heretical as a 15-Justice SCOTUS. Maybe not anymore.

Well, at least in terms of collective national attitude, that is; obviously, the actual governmental reforms are a tad harder to pull off than MLB instituting a pitch clock. But out there in the streets, the insistence on the figurative 10-foot rim is waning. In 2019, when a Marquette poll first asked Americans about expanding the Supreme Court, 42 percent were in favor with 56 percent opposed; by 2023, those numbers had flipped to 54-46 — and that’s before we got presidential immunity rulings and dozens of pro-Trump shadow docket dictats, unexplained and unsigned, oozing forth from the Conservative Justices’ benches.

Another poll, conducted around the time of the 2024 election, found that 56 percent of respondents supported a 150-seat expansion of the House of Representatives — a number that jumped to 60 percent with 40 percent opposed when language explained that such an addition would allow Members to represent fewer people and better serve their specific constituents. In other words, the logic of the change begins to supersede its apparent heresy — just as the volume of conversation around shortened NBA seasons or geographic realignment of entire leagues has been growing in recent years.

To step back: as is now apparently tradition with such musings, I willingly hide behind the bit of the headline up there that absolves me of full-baked responsibility. This mirroring between sports and political institutions isn’t, obviously, all that useful of a concept — the fact that fans and leagues seem to have shaken to some small extent the decades of overt hostility to change does not clear a hole in the D-line en route to a bigger House or SCOTUS or amended Constitution. But I find it at least instructive to examine American sports obsession and its characteristics in comparison to our other national pastimes; the country’s acceptance of adjustment, such as it is, may ebb and flow in more holistic ways than individual news stories suggest. One can think of this, then, as some tiny bit of wide-eyed optimism amid the gloom: the numbers, it turns out, maybe aren’t as sacred as we thought.