President Biden’s latest call to overhaul the Supreme Court and his warning that “extremism is undermining public confidence” in the bench, is part of an ongoing pattern of institutional criticism, some legal experts have said.
Biden called Monday for term limits and ethics guardrails for the justices to “prevent abuse of presidential power and restore faith in the Supreme Court.”
Over the past few decades, Democrats have clamored for institutional change, usually after facing political headwinds from a decision.
Another example followed the 2016 election, when Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called for the abolition of the electoral college.
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Warren argued in 2019 during a campaign stop in Jackson, Mississippi, that non-swing states are not often visited during the general election, and their voters are often overlooked.
At the same time, other Democrats were livid at the fact former presidental candidate Hillary Clinton scored many more popular votes than Donald Trump, but Trump won by 77 electors.
In 2013, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, D-Nev., invoked the “nuclear option” to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for Senate-vetted nominees.
At the time, Sen. Mitch McConnell warned Reid, “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.”
Within a few years, McConnell’s premonition came to pass as Democrats erupted at the Kentucky Republican after he utilized Reid’s precedent to extend the “option” to Supreme Court nominees and quickly shepherded Trump’s picks through the confirmation process.
Democrats have decried censorship of journalists on X during Elon Musk’s tenure, while having limited qualms with the Jack Dorsey-led Twitter censoring the New York Post’s Hunter Biden bombshell.
Legal experts characterized the reality of the proposed changes as exceedingly unlikely.
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“With respect to Biden wanting to institute term limits on Supreme Court justices, this is a pipe dream at best,” said Ken Belkin, a criminal defense and civil rights attorney in New York.
“U.S. Supreme Court Justices’ terms are set by the Constitution, and they are set for life — so long as the justice serves in good behavior. In order to set term limits like President Biden proposes, it would require a constitutional amendment.”
Belkin noted the tenuous process to pass a constitutional amendment. Thirty-eight state legislatures must approve it.
Expanding the court, he noted, could, however, be done through legislative action.
“The attacks on the Supreme Court are being inflamed by certain politicians and media outlets who seem to either have a fundamental misunderstanding of the court’s role or are intentionally misleading the public,” Belkin added.
“The court does not exist to rubber stamp one’s policy preferences whether they be liberal or conservative.”
Another legal expert offered that there is indeed a trend on the left to overhaul institutions.
“Clearly, if the left sees something that it doesn’t like, it ordains it to be a problem that has to be fixed. Here, of course, they are trying to monkey around with the one branch of government that is, that they don’t control, and that is supposed to be independent,” said former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Malcolm.
Malcolm, now a senior legal fellow at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, said judges have a lifetime tenure because they are supposed to be independent, and that it is the transition to six conservative justices on the bench that has made the left “go nuts.”
Malcolm noted justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito had been under fire from Democrats for accepting trips from wealthy friends, pointing out silence on that side of the aisle when the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did the same thing.
Throughout Biden’s decades in office, Malcolm said, Biden has never voiced such support for court reforms, but he has done so with 99 days to go in his political career.
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“This is blatantly political [and] designed to rally the Democratic base,” Malcolm said.
“It’s not about trying to address a so-called problem or a serious effort at reforms.”
As for the political angle of the apparent pattern, Article III Project President Mike Davis said Biden is corruptly trying to “selectively disqualify” justices he doesn’t like.
“And our president, who politicized and weaponized his Justice Department to destroy his political opponent, now wants to destroy the Supreme Court who stopped him,” said Davis, whose organization has a textualist interpretation of the Constitution and helps vet and confirm judicial nominees such as Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“[Biden’s] vice president aided and abetted him every step of the way,” Davis added.
Davis called the behavior on the left “the gravest threat imaginable to our republic,” saying Biden and Harris are essentially trying to destroy a co-equal branch of government.
“Both are the ‘dictator’ and ‘danger to democracy’ they project onto their political opponents,” Davis said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
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