President Joe Biden will unveil a comprehensive agenda on Monday to reform the Supreme Court in the final months of his presidency.
Biden’s “bold” three-part proposal is designed to “restore trust and accountability when it comes to the Presidency and the United States Supreme Court,” according to a White House official. The president will make his case during remarks at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum and in an op-ed with the Washington Post.
The plan contains three main features: A “No One Is Above the Law” constitutional amendment to state a former president does not have immunity for crimes carried out in office, term limits for Supreme Court justices, and a “binding” code of conduct for the high court.
The first comes in response to former President Donald Trump and his case of presidential immunity, which the Supreme Court ruled on July 1. Term limits are significant, given that all three justices Trump nominated during his presidency are still in their 50s. And a code of conduct follows concerns from high-profile Democrats that Republican-appointed justices lack impartiality.
The White House official described the timing of Biden’s proposal as coming “in the face of this crisis of confidence in America’s democratic institutions.” Biden will argue on Monday that the high court has “overturned long-established legal precedents protecting fundamental rights,” such as Roe v. Wade.
Many Democratic lawmakers, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), have criticized the Supreme Court for, in their eyes, compromising democracy. Accusations of ethical violations have particularly been aimed at Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Ocasio-Cortez filed impeachment articles against the two justices.
The high court’s ruling that Trump may have some immunity from prosecution regarding actions he took after the 2020 election enraged Democrats further.
Republicans, on the other hand, have accused Democrats of seeking to undermine the legitimacy of the court purely for political reasons since conservatives hold a 6-3 majority. Both Thomas and Alito, the former accused of ethic violations for accepting “gifts” from wealthy friends and not disclosing them and the latter facing criticism because flags associated with right-wing groups hung from his homes, have defended their impartiality and have not recused themselves from cases tied to Trump and Jan. 6.
Reports have circulated for weeks that Biden may take the step to try and reform the Supreme Court, beginning in the wake of his disastrous debate performance that precipitated his withdrawal from the top of his party’s presidential ticket.
Even some Republicans who have sided with Democrats in the past have questioned the constitutionality of a separate branch of government imposing rules on the Supreme Court.
Democrats’ attempts to enact change in the Supreme Court loom over all of the 2024 elections.
First off, this is nothing more than demagoguery. The "reforms" in this proposal would require a constitutional amendment. Such amendments require either two-thirds majorities in both chambers of Congress or an Article V convention to send it to the states. Thirty-eight state legislatures would then have to ratify the amendment, but it wouldn't get past the thresholds; such a proposal won't get that kind of a consensus in either chamber of Congress, and the Left lives in (unjustified) fear of an Article V convention. It's an absurd attempt to undermine the Supreme Court by the Left and find shortcuts to taking it back over again more quickly than current prospects allow.
So who does this demagoguery serve? It doesn't serve Biden, who's not running for president any longer. It does serve Kamala Harris, however, and appears to align much closer to the views of her progressive allies than it does Biden's previous positions on such changes.
And it is mighty curious that this reversal comes after Biden went incognito for a week while withdrawing from the race by tweet, and then waiting three days to appear before a camera and offer no real explanation. The White House insists that Biden is fully capable of handling the duties of his office, but so far we have seen no evidence of that, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Perhaps Biden himself has decided to fully throw in with the progressives -- his legislative agenda during this one term certainly suggests that, and his appointments to the courts and executive branch do as well. Biden plans to deliver a speech in Austin, TX this week to argue for this new plan, which goes beyond the recommendations of his own study commission -- whose findings Biden buried in the end anyway.
However, it seems as though that Harris and her team are now making policy decisions for the rump of Biden's term in office. Harris needs to energize progressives, and one way of doing that is to make the Supreme Court an election issue. Conservatives do that as well in every election cycle, but they did so in the same way Democrats did: on the basis of appointment philosophies of the nominees. Revamping the Constitution is a far more radical and polarizing approach, which Biden used to recognize until, oh, a couple of weeks ago.
This unique set of circumstances keeps raising the question of who's actually in charge at the White House. Is Biden making these decisions himself as the elected president, the person in whom these authorities are specifically vested? Or have other people begun setting policy? This differs from LBJ's sudden withdrawal in 1968; no one questioned LBJ's capacity to execute the duties of his office, and his withdrawal was predicated at least in part on difficult changes in war policy that would have otherwise looked like electoral pandering. Biden's withdrawal is clearly predicated on incapacity in some form, either immediate or short-term enough to require an emergency replacement on the November ballot, after having campaigned and won every primary and caucus in this cycle.
If Harris is actually running the executive branch, we need to know that. If Biden is still nominally running things but getting pressured to change directions to suit Harris' campaign, we should know that too. A quasi-presidency is far more significant and worrisome than a fantasy about constitutional amendments to revamp the Supreme Court.
