House Joint Resolution 1, which Biggs introduced in January 2025, would amend the Constitution to lock the Court’s membership at nine seats, a number that has gone unchanged by statute since 1869. The measure needed roughly 290 votes to pass under the Constitution’s amendment process. It received 212 votes in favor, with 206 members voting against it.
Biggs framed the resolution as a safeguard against future efforts to alter the Court’s composition for political advantage.
“If a sitting majority can change the size of the Supreme Court the moment it dislikes its rulings, what happens the next time the other side is in power? That’s why I’m urging my colleagues to support my resolution for a Constitutional Amendment to permanently fix the number of Supreme Court Justices at Nine,” Biggs wrote on his X account.
The resolution advanced out of the House Judiciary Committee before reaching the floor, though it did not draw broad enough support across the full chamber to clear the amendment threshold. Biggs has pointed to repeated proposals in Congress in recent years to expand the Court’s membership beyond nine seats as the reason a permanent fix is needed, arguing that without a constitutional lock, the number of justices remains subject to change by simple legislation whenever a future majority in Congress decides to act.
The Constitution does not specify a fixed number of justices, leaving Congress free to set the size of the Court by statute. That number has shifted several times in the nation’s history, ranging from six to ten justices before settling at nine following the Judiciary Act of 1869.
Biggs’s resolution sought to remove that flexibility entirely by writing the number nine directly into the Constitution, a change that would require not only a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate but ratification by three-fourths of the states.
With the House vote falling short, the resolution does not advance to the Senate in its current form. A constitutional amendment that fails to clear one chamber can be reintroduced in a future Congress, and Biggs has not indicated whether he plans to bring the measure back in a later session or pursue an alternative legislative vehicle to revisit the Court’s size.
