Joe Biden used the op-ed page of the Washington Post rather than an address to the nation to announce his anticipated “reform” plan for the US Supreme Court on Monday. This eleventh-hour grasp for power and relevance was brought on by the US Supreme Court ruling against Biden’s attempt to use the Executive Branch as the only branch of government and manipulate it to punish his political opponents contrary to law and custom.
The announcement was foreshadowed earlier in the month when the Washington Post was chosen as the vehicle to announce what was in the works; see Biden Coming After the Supreme Court—Wants Term Limits, Enforceable Ethics Code, Immunity Amendment and Joe Biden to Unveil His Supreme Court Plans—and They’re Non-Starters. It is in direct response to two related factors. The 6-3 conservative majority does not seem to be going anywhere. If Trump wins, that majority will probably be cemented for at least another generation. The Supreme Court has proven to be the bulwark defending our civil liberties from the fascistic tendencies of Biden and his supporters. The second factor is that the Supreme Court has made rulings curtailing the ability of federal agencies to rule by fiat (Loper Bright) and has attacked one of the sacraments of the Democrats’ secular religion by ruling that abortion is not a constitutional right (Dobbs). Along the way, it limited the ability of Democrats to use the legal system to harass and imprison opposing politicians by recognizing that a president has some degree of immunity for official acts.
The plan has three components:
1) The No One Is Above the Law constitutional amendment (lol) prohibiting criminal immunity for ex-presidents.
2) Supreme Court term limits that permit each president to appoint a justice every two years for an 18-year term.
3) Supreme Court Code of Conduct.
The first item is just a sop thrown to Biden’s supporters to act as a soothing balm for their raging case of butthurt over being unable to put Trump in prison. That’s it. The Supreme Court decision granting some immunity to a president for “official acts” prevented Barack Obama from ending up in a supermax prison doing life without parole for droning US citizens with less due process than a parking ticket merits. Biden will be thankful for this ruling if Trump is reelected.
There is no mention if this would also apply to brothers and gits of ex-presidents, probably not if the ex-president is a Democrat and crack and Chinese money are involved. On a serious side, any law stripping the president of immunity for official acts will attach to every other officer in the Executive Branch. I’m not sure how many US Attorneys will want to be vulnerable to prosecution or civil action for cases they brought while in office.
As with the rest of this “reform,” it is a monumentally unserious proposal. There is no national outcry to make this happen, and there aren’t the votes in the House and Senate to pass it even if Chuck Schumer and Mike Johnson decide to take it seriously.
As to term limits for the Supreme Court, this is Biden’s rationale.
Second, we have had term limits for presidents for nearly 75 years. We should have the same for Supreme Court justices. The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court. Term limits would help ensure that the court’s membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary. It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come. I support a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court.
What Biden strenuously ignores is that this requires a Constitutional Amendment. There are not enough votes in the Senate to break cloture on this nonsense, much less pass it. He also misrepresents what such an amendment would accomplish. Inevitably, death, retirement, or illness will result in a president having more than two picks. With losses by natural attrition, a president serving two terms could easily appoint five or six justices, making the system much more polarized.
I’m not sure how the Supreme Court Code of Conduct can be seen as anything but a stalking horse to allow Democrat groups to legally harass members of the Supreme Court. We’re already seeing how this operates without a code of conduct. Samuel Alito is under attack because his wife flew the “Appeal to Heaven” flag in response to “pride” flags flown by some of their grotesque neighbors. Clarence Thomas is under attack because his wife is a GOP activist. No one cared about the trips and vacations other justices took, but they are very, very concerned about Justice Thomas’s and Justice Alito’s trips. There is no evidence the Supreme Court has an ethics problem other than leftwing law clerks leaking decisions.
The bottom line here is that Joe Biden is a failed president who has been rejected by his party because of his senility. The messenger for this proposal — a newspaper’s op-ed page — shows its lack of seriousness. This is just a sad attempt by a sad and pathetic little man to prove he’s still relevant. The good news for the rest of us is that he isn’t.
