Joe Biden calls for Supreme Court reforms, end of presidential immunity

Joe Biden called for limiting the justices to 18-year terms, and an enforceable code of conduct as well as the end to giving former presidents immunity for crimes committed in office.

Joe Biden speaks to the press before boarding Marine One en route to Austin, Texas. Picture: Getty Images via AFP.

President Biden unveiled plans to overhaul the Supreme Court in remarks Monday at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.

Mr Biden proposed a constitutional amendment overturning the court’s recent decision giving Donald Trump and other former presidents immunity for crimes they allegedly commit while in office, called for limiting the justices to 18-year terms, and demanded an enforceable code of conduct in place of the self-policing system the court adopted last year.

For years, Biden resisted calls from progressives for action to rein in a deeply conservative court that has thwarted Democratic initiatives from fighting climate change to providing debt relief for student borrowers.

There is little chance Biden’s proposals will advance before the November election, but with public approval of the court at historic lows, Democrats believe they will resonate with voters. Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic nominee for president, strongly backed Biden’s proposals.

“There is a clear crisis of confidence facing the Supreme Court as its fairness has been called into question after numerous ethics scandals and decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent,” Harris said Monday.

The Supreme Court in Washington, DC. Picture: Getty Images via AFP.

Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had been cool to entreaties from progressives to take aim at the court, even as it veered sharply to the right after Trump replaced liberal and more moderate justices with staunch conservatives. In his first year in office, Biden appointed a Blue-Ribbon Commission to study questions about the court’s structure but took no action after it filed a lengthy but little-read report.

Recent developments, including the decision awarding ex-presidents criminal immunity, persuaded Biden that structural changes were necessary, a person familiar with the plans said.

“This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one,” Biden wrote in a Washington Post opinion column published Monday.

“I have great respect for our institutions and separation of powers. What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach,” he wrote.

News reports raising questions about some justices’ ethics, including luxury vacations a wealthy benefactor provided to Justice Clarence Thomas, troubled the president, the person familiar with the plans said, leading him to conclude an enforceable code of conduct was necessary.

At least one justice agrees; last week, Justice Elena Kagan told a judicial conference that while she approved of the ethics rules the court adopted under pressure last year, they should include an enforcement mechanism rather than making each justice the judge of his or her own conduct.

Republicans generally have dismissed criticism of the court as sour grapes from Democrats unhappy with its decisions.

“The Roberts court has brought constitutional balance back to the court, ” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said Sunday on the CBS News program, “Face the Nation.” Democrats “have no desire to make the court better. They’re just trying to make it more liberal,” he said.

Because the Constitution provides life tenure to justices, it is unclear whether Congress could devise a way to impose term limits on the Supreme Court. And while justices have complied with financial disclosure laws, some justices have questioned whether Congress can impose rules on a coequal branch of government.

Amending the Constitution is difficult. Proposals must be passed by two-thirds votes of each house of Congress, or by a convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures, and then ratified by three-fourths of the states.

The most recent amendment, the 27th, which limits congressional pay raises, was ratified in 1992, some 203 years after it was proposed. The 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18, was ratified more quickly, within four months of its congressional approval in March 1971.

Noticeably absent from Biden’s plans, however, was a clearly constitutional option: Increasing the number of justices so that the court’s ideological majority could be diluted, as some progressives wish. Although Congress has altered the court’s size at several points, the number of justices has remained at nine since 1869. Critics say that court-packing to alter the outcome of cases would further politicise the judiciary.

The president will speak at a commemoration of the Civil Rights Act that Lyndon B. Johnson signed in July 1964, which employed the federal power over interstate commerce to end discrimination in restaurants, retail stores, transportation and workplaces. The liberal Supreme Court of the 1960s upheld the statute against challenges from Southern businesses that sought to discriminate against Black customers.

More recently, a 2020 Supreme Court decision held that the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of sex discrimination covers LGBT employees.

Dow Jones