WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden said the Supreme Court’s legitimacy is being called into doubt, but said he still opposes expanding the bench or other large-scale reforms.
Biden said Thursday it would be a “mistake” to add justices to the Supreme Court because it would “politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy.” The president, however, expressed optimism justices could make changes on their own to improve the court’s standing.
“I think that some of the court are beginning to realize their legitimacy is being questioned in ways that hadn’t been questioned in the past,” Biden said in an MSNBC interview.
The president offered some of his sharpest criticism of the Supreme Court earlier in the day after a majority struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions.
“It’s done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history,” Biden said when asked to explain his comment that the court was “not normal.”
Biden said the conservative-majority court, which has overridden precedents to strike down the nationwide right to an abortion, curb environmental protections and restrict gun laws, is “out of sorts with the basic value system of the American people.”
“Across the board, the vast majority of the American people don’t agree with a lot of the decisions this court is making,” the president said.
(Akayla Gardner, Jennifer Jacobs, Stephanie Lai and Ryan Teague Beckwith contributed to this report.)
