Expand the Supreme Court. And weaken it.

The sweeping immunity that the court recently granted former president Donald Trump is the latest example of the six conservative justices acting like Republican partisans. Recent rulings striking down bans on bump stocks and weakening the powers of federal agencies continue the court’s pattern of putting judges at the center of policymaking, supplanting officials who are actually the experts on policy issues.

A Republican-dominated, power-grabbing high court can’t be fixed simply by Democrats winning elections. The conservative justices aren’t that old. (The most senior are Samuel A. Alito Jr., 74, and Clarence Thomas, who is 76.) And the opinions and public comments of Alito and Thomas, as well as controversies involving their spouses, suggest that they are very unlikely to retire if there is any chance they would be replaced by a liberal judge.

So even if the Democrats win the 2024 and 2028 presidential elections and keep control of the Senate for the next several years, America could still have another decade of six people enacting an agenda far to the right of the country overall.

We can’t wait that long. This right-wing judicial supremacy must end. There have been lots of proposals from people on the left over the past few years to rein in the Roberts court. Two are essential. First, Democrats need to pass a law adding four justices to the high court whenever the party next controls the House, Senate and the presidency.

That should be paired with a second policy: requiring a supermajority of the court to overturn a federal law or agency decision.

What unifies these ideas is that they acknowledge what everyone knows but the justices themselves and many attorneys won’t admit: Beyond what’s clearly spelled out in the Constitution and legislation, such as presidents serving four-year terms, it’s really hard to determine what is legal or constitutional. The doctrines supposedly guiding judges aren’t formal or universally agreed upon, whether they are from the right (“originalism” and “textualism”) or the left (retired liberal Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s “active liberty.”)

A judge’s views on whether abortion should be allowed will inevitably reflect their broader policy preferences. The current Supreme Court has six Republicans who were chosen because they were expected to consistently vote in favor of right-wing causes. That selection and vetting process has worked — we have one of the most conservative high courts in recent memory.

Because the Supreme Court is making ideological and partisan decisions, it should be accountable to voters and the democratic process, just as members of Congress and the president are. That’s what “court-packing” does. The Democrats would add seats and give themselves a majority when they had the votes. The Republicans would almost certainly do the same.

In a paper they wrote jointly, scholars Adam Chilton, Daniel Epps, Kyle Rozema and Maya Sen estimated that the Supreme Court would have 23 justices by around 2070 if both parties added seats whenever they had control. That’s more than double the current number, but not excessive.

But I’m not longing for a Supreme Court of Chief Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and six liberals constantly blocking policies passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Republican president. Unelected judges, whatever their ideology, should not be constantly overriding the decisions of members of Congress, the president and federal agencies.

Presidents and members of Congress are not necessarily smarter than judges. But they are more accountable to the public. If Americans don’t like the policies Congress or the president are coming up with, they can vote them out. The leaders of independent agencies are mostly appointed by the president or Congress and usually have term limits, again creating a clear, democratic path to replacing them.

In contrast, justices have both huge power and lifetime tenures.

So, we should require at least 75 percent of justices on the court to strike down the actions of a federal agency or parts or all of a federal law. If the court had 13 justices, 10 of them would have to come together, likely reflecting a broad, bipartisan consensus that a law is improper. If lower-level federal judges struck down an action of the legislative and executive branches, the rulings wouldn’t stand unless 10 of the 13 Supreme Court justices agreed. (Law professors Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn have been the among most prominent advocates of scaling back judicial power, including through a supermajority requirement.)

Judicial review is not in the Constitution, so this proposal would not require an amendment, just an act of Congress. It would require overturning the court’s history of ruling by a simple majority. And this change might be rejected by the current Supreme Court. That’s another reason adding justices is essential.

I suspect many conservative laws and agency moves that I oppose couldn’t be knocked down through the courts under this proposal. But there would be a clear path to changing those policies: my preferred candidates winning elections.

The obvious and important objection to this idea is that without strong judicial review, Congress and the president would pass extreme laws and there would be no recourse. But, as Harvard Law professor Nikolas Bowie has argued, the reality is that the Supreme Court has never been a stalwart defender of individual or minority rights. Brown v. Board of Education might be the court’s most famous ruling, but Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson are just as representative of its jurisprudence.

The Roberts court has taken a number of actions, most notably weakening the Voting Rights Act, that follow in the court’s long history of not being on the side of women, racial minorities and other groups who have been disadvantaged in America.

It’s not worth giving a simple majority of Supreme Court judges almost total power to invalidate good laws just for the occasional time they step in to kill a really bad one.

What about state laws? Ultimately, even though the United States has federalism, it’s one country. Federal law should be supreme. So, I don’t favor raising the threshold to invalidate state laws. We don’t want to encourage a problematic trend: state lawmakers on the right adopting policies that are pretty obvious violations of federal law.

These proposals might seem radical and unrealistic. But they are necessary. The Supreme Court just made it easier to turn your rifle into a machine gun but harder to investigate a president who tried to overturn the election results. That’s crazy. No policy favored by liberals is safe if it’s up to these six judges.

“Why should a court be in charge of a democracy? The answer is: It shouldn’t,” Bowie wrote a few years ago.

Until they secured a dominant majority on the Supreme Court, conservatives used to complain about “activist judges.” I don’t want to give conservatives too much credit. Today’s right-wing legal movement has its roots in opposition to the Brown ruling, which was a much-needed call for America to give Black students education opportunities equal to White ones.

But perhaps the conservatives had a point. I don’t want to keep living in a country run by activist right-wing judges. So if that means I have to give up having left-wing judges write their views into law, I’ll accept that trade.

Add justices to the court. And then subtract from the court’s power.