Governor Josh Shapiro’s call on MSNBC for “radical reform” of the Supreme Court is the latest reminder that the institutional left views any check on its power as illegitimate. When a governor from a swing state says “everything is on the table,” he is telegraphing that court-packing, term limits, or jurisdiction-stripping are no longer fringe academic proposals but active political goals. For the Second Amendment community this is not an abstract debate about judicial norms; it is a direct threat to the structural protections that have produced Bruen, Heller, and McDonald. Those decisions rest on an originalist majority that refuses to treat the right to keep and bear arms as a second-class liberty subject to interest-balancing by progressive legislatures.
The practical effect of any successful court-reform scheme would be to install justices willing to revive the very “two-step” interest-balancing test the Bruen Court explicitly rejected. States could then reenact magazine bans, “assault weapon” prohibitions, and discretionary carry regimes with the assurance that five new votes would uphold them. Law-abiding gun owners in Pennsylvania and beyond would once again face the prospect of seeing lawfully purchased firearms declared illegal by judicial fiat rather than by the democratic process. Shapiro’s rhetoric also signals that Democrats intend to nationalize this fight, turning every future vacancy or Senate majority into an existential contest over whether the Bill of Rights remains judicially enforceable.
The 2A community’s response must therefore move beyond defending individual statutes and focus on preserving the institutional architecture that makes those defenses possible. That means supporting originalist judicial nominees at every level, backing state attorneys general who litigate aggressively against unconstitutional gun laws, and making the Supreme Court’s composition a top-tier election issue rather than an afterthought. If “everything is on the table” for the left, then safeguarding an independent Court willing to enforce the Second Amendment must be on the table for gun owners.
