Joe Biden plans to endorse term limits for supreme court justices and a new ethics code, the Washington Post reported, as an emboldened rightwing court continues to upend US legal precedent despite operating under the cloud of multiple ethics scandals.
Biden is also mulling whether to call for a new constitutional amendment that would eliminate sweeping immunity for presidents and other officials, the Post reported, citing two unnamed people familiar with the president’s thinking.
The court’s ruling on 1 July establishing sweeping immunity for US presidents has been widely criticized as an attack on the rule of law that gives presidents the power of a king.
In recent weeks, Biden had a phone call with Laurence Tribe, a leading constitutional scholar, to discuss Tribe’s opinion piece in the Guardian proposing concrete steps to reform the supreme court, which included new term limits, an “enforceable ethics code” and an amendment limiting presidential immunity, the Post reported.
Among additional reforms Americans should consider, Tribe wrote in that piece, was the idea of creating “several added seats [on the court] to offset the way Trump as president stacked the court to favor his Maga agenda”.
But adding justices to the court, as some Democratic members of Congress have advocated for, is not among the reforms Biden is currently considering, according to the Post. Biden has long been seen as unwilling to expand the court.
Tribe did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.
The president previewed his plans for supreme court reform in a Zoom call with the Congressional Progressive caucus on Saturday, the Post reported, citing a transcript of the call that included Biden telling members that “I’m about to come out with a major initiative on limiting the court” and that he had been “working with constitutional scholars for the last three months”.
The supreme court’s approval rating in polls of the American public has dropped sharply in recent years, as the court has overturned the constitutional right to abortion, expanded gun rights and seized regulatory power from federal agencies and taken it into its own hands. In one recent poll, 61% of respondents said they disapproved of the job the court had been doing.
