Even if Democrats sweep the November elections, their hopes of rewriting the laws and policies of the Trump administration would face a significant obstacle — a Supreme Court with a conservative majority that is likely to stay in place for another decade or more.

So some Democratic presidential candidates are proposing to expand the court, for the first time in 150 years, or to broaden the rules for selecting its members.

Something must be done “to stop the descent of the Supreme Court into becoming yet another political body,” said Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor with the most far-reaching plan to remake the court. It would increase the number of justices from nine to 15: five Democrats and five Republicans, appointed by the president to life terms, and five lower-court judges chosen by the 10 justices to serve one year on the high court. Buttigieg’s term as mayor ended on New Year’s Day.

“It’s not just about expansion, it’s about depoliticizing the Supreme Court,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., one of several candidates who say they’d consider legislation to add two to four justices to the court. Others include Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., entrepreneur Andrew Yang and San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer.

Warren’s chief rival on the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders, opposes enlarging the court — “Republicans will do the same thing” when they regain power, he warns. But he believes a future president would have the power, under current law, to “rotate” Supreme Court justices to federal appeals courts after a certain period, and replace them with appellate judges of the president’s choosing.

Among the leading candidates, whose next debate is in Iowa on Tuesday evening, former Vice President Joe Biden is the chief skeptic of proposals to overhaul the high court.

“I’m not prepared to go on and try to pack the court, because we’ll live to rue the day,” Biden told an Iowa interviewer in July.

Republican leaders agree.

“Out of the ash heap of history came this talk of court-packing,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., tweeted in March. Some Republicans have proposed a constitutional amendment to freeze the number of Supreme Court justices at nine.

The “court-packing” label carries reminders of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s short-lived attempt to enlarge an equally conservative court in the late 1930s. A leading current proponent, Aaron Belkin, a San Francisco State political science professor, dubbed his advocacy group Pack the Court before renaming it Take Back the Court.

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Semantics aside, Belkin says Democrats shouldn’t be intimidated by charges of injecting politics into the judiciary.

In a recent Pepperdine Law Review article, Belkin said back-and-forth efforts by both parties to maintain a judicial majority “may harm the courts’ legitimacy, but that may be a better outcome than passively allowing the GOP theft of the judiciary.”

That is the Democrats’ chief grievance: McConnell’s refusal in 2016 to consider President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland for a crucial Supreme Court seat, later filled by President Trump’s appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans were blocking most of Obama’s appeals court candidates in the last two years of his presidency. Besides his two Supreme Court selections, Gorsuch and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump had 50 appeals court nominees confirmed by the Senate by the end of 2019 — only five fewer than senators approved during Obama’s two White House terms.

Belkin proposes adding at least four seats to the Supreme Court — two to potentially outvote each of Trump’s appointees, he says — and enough new lower-court judgeships to make up for those Obama was unable to fill.

Those additions could be enabled by Congress without amending the Constitution, though it would probably take a repeal of the Senate’s filibuster rule, which can require 60 votes to pass laws. A constitutional amendment would require two-thirds majorities in both houses and ratification by legislatures in three-fourths of the states.

The size of the Supreme Court is set by Congress, not by the Constitution. It started with six members, varied between five and 10 in the following decades, and was reduced to the current nine members in 1869 by lawmakers unwilling to let President Andrew Johnson appoint a justice after he was impeached and nearly removed from office.

Even a new Democratic majority and a sympathetic president wouldn’t guarantee a larger court. Several Democratic senators say they’re satisfied with the court’s size, if not its membership. Some, like Sanders, say expansion would lead to Republican reprisals; others, for similar reasons, are reluctant to abolish the filibuster.

The candidates agree that they want to make the court less political. Sanders, meanwhile, has promised to appoint only justices who have made it clear they would defend Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 ruling that declared a right to abortion. Biden pledged to appoint justices who support the constitutional right of privacy, on which Roe vs. Wade was based. Warren, on her campaign website, has promised to nominate “a demonstrated advocate for workers to fill any Supreme Court vacancy.”

Arguably that would require the same type of ideological screening used by Trump, who pledged as a candidate to appoint justices who would overturn Roe vs. Wade, and whose judicial selections are preapproved by the staunchly conservative Federalist Society.

Buttigieg, too, says he wants a “less politicized” Supreme Court — while proposing, as a primary option, a court explicitly composed of Democrats, Republicans and their agreed-on, presumably nonpartisan short-term selections.

The plan was spelled out in a recent Yale Law Review essay by two professors, Daniel Epps of Washington University and Ganesh Sitaraman of Vanderbilt, who insist it could be done without amending the Constitution.

Congress, they noted, has passed laws for many decades specifying the political membership of dozens of independent federal agencies appointed by the president, such as the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Election Commission and the Commission on Civil Rights. No more than half of their members can belong to any one party, a requirement that the courts have left undisturbed.

It’s another question, though, whether the same standard could apply to a court whose independent status — presidential nomination, Senate confirmation, life tenure — is spelled out in the Constitution.

“You could have the president agreeing to consider nominations from the parties, but I don’t see how you could, statutorily, take the president’s power away to select whoever he or she wants,” said David Levine, a law professor at UC Hastings in San Francisco. Even more constitutionally dubious, he said, was the proposal to have the 10 party-designated justices, rather than the president, choose five lower-court judges for one-year terms on the high court.

“I think you can add (justices) but you can’t fundamentally overhaul” the appointment system without amending the Constitution, said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Another widely aired proposal is term limits, such as 18 years, for Supreme Court justices. Buttigieg says he would consider it, and Levinson supports it. But it would also face a legal barrier: the constitutional provision that federal judges shall hold office “during good behavior,” or until retirement, death or impeachment.

Sanders, though, said at the June debate that he believes “constitutionally we have the power to rotate (Supreme Court) judges to lower courts, and that brings in new blood into the Supreme Court.”

Levine of UC Hastings said he doesn’t think the Constitution would allow Congress to alter life terms for the nine current justices, but lawmakers could authorize the president to appoint future justices for a specific term on the high court, followed by a transfer to a lower court.

On the other hand, Loyola’s Levinson said the Constitution’s guarantee of life tenure for the justices is consistent with the widely held view that “they should be outside the political realm.” And as a practical matter, said Take Back the Court’s Belkin, the validity of a Democratic move to limit future Supreme Court terms would most likely be decided by the current court.

“Court expansion may be the least risky judicial reform option” because it could be done legally and would change both the judicial and political landscapes, Belkin said at a convention of the liberal American Constitution Society. The court in its current form, he said, “cannot be saved unless both parties are committed to democracy.”

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko