Ballotpedia Logs 27 Article III Vacancies as the Court-Expansion Debate Resurfaces Before the Midterms

Ballotpedia’s September 7, 2026 Robe & Gavel vacancy count recorded 27 of 870 active Article III judicial positions vacant. The figure is a routine monthly snapshot rather than an event, and it is recorded here for the series rather than the month: a vacancy count is the input to the appointment pipeline this timeline tracks, and the denominator matters when any single confirmation is later described as significant.

Separately, and on a different track, the question of expanding the Supreme Court re-entered public argument in the weeks before the November midterms. A September 10 analysis in Reason argued that court expansion remains constitutionally permissible while opposing it on prudential grounds — a position worth noting precisely because it comes from a source unsympathetic to the proposal, and because the constitutional question and the desirability question are routinely collapsed in coverage that treats expansion as legally doubtful. It is not: the size of the Court is set by statute, and has been changed by statute seven times.

What this entry does not assert. The capture that produced it also described a House Republican constitutional amendment to fix the Court permanently at nine justices, and Democratic leadership signals that court reform would be a priority in a new majority. Neither is carried here as fact. The amendment was sourced to a search synthesis pointing at a Senate press release rather than to a bill number, and the leadership signals were attributed to unnamed “multiple sources.” A constitutional amendment has a resolution number, a sponsor, and a committee referral; until those are in hand, the claim is not documented. That verification is filed as an open lead rather than written into canon.

The 1937 precedent sits in this timeline already, and the useful comparison is structural rather than rhetorical: FDR’s plan failed in a Senate his own party controlled, which is the fact that makes court expansion a recurring proposal rather than a live one.