If Democrats win big in November, you should probably expect them to seek to pack the Supreme Court with their partisans.
President Joe Biden endorsed a Supreme Court “reform” plan in an op-ed column for The Washington Post on Monday. The plan was also endorsed by the acting president—er, I mean Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the plan, Biden—the byline says he wrote it, so let’s pretend that’s true for a moment—listed a series of radical proposals cloaked in language to give them the appearance of being reasonable.
“I have great respect for our institutions and the separation of powers,” Biden wrote in a line that seemed kind of familiar, before laying out his case for their destruction.
The president’s first proposal was to call for an amendment to “make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office.”
This is a shot at a recent Supreme Court decision holding that presidents can’t be prosecuted for official decisions they make as president. As my colleague Tony Kinnett wrote, Biden and his Democratic allies have largely demagogued on the content of that ruling to make it seem like the Supreme Court gave presidents the all-clear to do anything they want.
That just isn’t so.
Here’s what Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion:
The President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law. But Congress may not criminalize the President’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the Executive Branch under the Constitution. And the system of separated powers designed by the Framers has always demanded an energetic, independent Executive.
That’s not a call for the president to be given absolute power. It’s laying out the case that the Constitution was designed to prevent the United States from becoming a banana republic, where losing power means being sent to prison—or worse.
Biden’s second—and perhaps more significant—proposal is to create 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices. He paired that with allowing presidents to appoint justices every two years.
As Dan McLaughlin at National Review pointed out, removing the lifetime terms for Supreme Court justices would require a constitutional amendment. It’s also essentially a court-packing plan
Biden doesn’t say whether those term limits would apply to current Supreme Court justices or not. If it did, that means the court would swing from a 6-3 conservative majority to a 5-4 liberal majority. How convenient.
Way back in 1983, then-Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., called President Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing plan in the 1930s a “bonehead idea.”
It’s interesting that one of Biden’s last official policy proposals is to go full bonehead.
Packing the Supreme Court is such a terrible idea that past Supreme Court justices appointed by Democratic presidents—Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—have denounced it.
Biden’s final proposal is to foist a new “code of conduct” on the Supreme Court to supersede their current, internally enforced ethics rules. It’s a clear violation of the separation of powers and based on the completely fabricated narrative that the Supreme Court is mired in ethics scandals.
Here’s what Federalist Society Chairman Leonard Leo had to say about the ethics proposal.
Frankly, it’s painfully obvious what Biden’s Supreme Court “reforms” are all about.
The Supreme Court is one of the vanishingly few institutions in American life that the Left doesn’t control. For a long time, Democrats could count on the nation’s highest court to either affirm their policies or—certainly in the case of the “Warren Court”—outright foist them on the American people.
When the court shifted to the right, the Left immediately insisted that it was no longer legitimate.
It’s a fairly ironclad rule in American politics that any institution the Left doesn’t control it will ultimately seek to destroy. So it goes with the modern Supreme Court.
Biden—or whoever is speaking and writing for him these days—is hardly concerned with the ethics of Supreme Court justices. Recent “scandals” were all just cooked up by his elite media allies who gaslit the American people about the president’s health much of the past four years.
What the administration cares about is that, for now and in the future, the Supreme Court represents a potential roadblock to their absolute power over American government.
The easiest way to change that dynamic is to force more justices onto the court who agree with them and force out the ones who disagree. It’s that simple.
And if the Supreme Court collapses in efficacy and trust with the American people as a result? Well, then, the Left gets its way anyway. More power will likely fall on unaccountable executive and legislative agencies that have reliably pushed their preferred agendas for generations.
Institutionally, for the Left, that’s a win-win situation.
The only snag is whether this agenda flies with the American people. Are the American people keen on allowing Democrats to just stomp the Supreme Court flat so they can rule by unimpeded fiat?
I hate to say it, but many Americans probably would, and Democrats are apparently counting on that. Just read some of the comments online to Biden’s Washington Post column. Scary stuff.
But these people are still almost certainly in the minority. Through the years, polls have consistently shown that Americans strongly oppose court-packing or restructuring the Supreme Court.
The proposal is unlikely to go anywhere under the lamest of lame-duck presidential circumstances. However, it does signal that the Left openly wants one-party rule under the guise of “democracy.”
Demolishing the Supreme Court with Biden’s plan would bring them another step closer to that reality.
Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Jarrett Stepman.