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President Joe Biden on Monday called the U.S. Supreme Court “extreme” as he detailed his proposal for sweeping changes, including limiting justices to 18-year terms, during a speech to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin.
Biden unveiled his plan for Supreme Court reform, which also included an enforceable ethics code for the nine justices, in an op-ed in The Washington Post on Monday. He also called on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to limit presidential immunity.
“This nation is founded on the principle that there are no kings in America,” he said. “No one is above the law.”
Biden’s plan would give sitting presidents the power to appoint a Supreme Court justice every two years. Those justices would have 18-year terms, instead of lifetime appointments, and be subject to an ethics code that would require them to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have conflicts of interest, a nod to controversies this year surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas, his wife Ginny Thomas, and their proximity to conservative activists and donors.
Biden said such scandals had created a crisis of confidence in the court and that his reforms were attempts to restore the American public’s faith. He said the court was not currently self-policing and new laws needed to be enacted to make their disclosure of gifts and conflicts of interest mandatory.
Biden wrote in his op-ed that the changes to how Supreme Court justices are appointed would make them “more predictable and less arbitrary” and would “reduce the chance that any single president radically alters the makeup of the courts for generations to come.”
During his speech he criticized the move by Republicans to block President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court in 2016 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and then rush through a nominee to fill the slot vacated upon the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
“It’s outrageous,” he said.
He also said imposing term limits to the country’s highest court would put the U.S. in line with the world’s other major constitutional democracies, which also term-limit members of their judiciary systems.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign was quick to jump on the offensive, tying Biden’s plan to Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and saying it was part of her “scheme to pack the Supreme Court with far-left radical, judges who will render decisions based on politics, not law.”
“Kamala is on a crusade to undermine every last American institution and remake them in the Radical Left's image so she can force through her socialist agenda — and THAT'S a real threat to democracy,” Jake Schneider, a Trump campaign spokesperson said in a statement.
Biden announced his historic decision to withdraw from the presidential race a week ago, becoming the first sitting eligible president to not seek reelection since 1968 when LBJ, a Texan and a Democrat, opted against running for reelection.
That decision, along with his endorsement of Harris to replace him as the party’s nominee, has energized Democrats ahead of their national convention in Chicago next month and freed Biden to pursue further policy changes without the fear of alienating more moderate voters.
Biden had been cautious about calls to reform the court as a candidate. But as president, he grew increasingly concerned about the Supreme Court which he said had abandoned mainstream constitutional interpretation. In his speech Monday, Biden cited the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in its 2013 Shelby County decision, and its reversal of affirmative action policies last year as examples of “settled legal precedents” the court had overturned.
During a nationally broadcast speech to discuss his withdrawal from the presidential race last week, Biden said he’d unveil a plan for Supreme Court reform which he called “critical to our democracy.”
Last summer, a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs research found that 67% of Americans, including 82% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans, support a proposal to set Supreme Court justice terms to a specific number of years rather than a lifetime appointment.
The proposal is likely to please Democrats who have been critical of decisions by the 6-3 conservative majority of the Supreme Court to do away with federal protections for abortions and limit federal regulatory powers.
But Republicans pounced on the proposal. Sen. John Cornyn, a former attorney general and member of the Texas Supreme Court said on the Senate floor in Washington that Democrats were attacking the independence of the judiciary.
“I would point out when the court was maybe constituted a little differently, that our Democratic friends didn't say a peep as long as the court was making decisions that they liked and they agreed with from a political perspective,” he said.
Biden’s call for changes to presidential immunity comes after the Supreme Court granted Trump and future presidents broad immunity from prosecution in a Washington case against Trump which alleged he’d tried to overturn election results in his 2020 loss in the presidential race.
That move would require a constitutional amendment, a rare event in American history. The last constitutional amendment approved by Congress was in 1992 when it ratified the 27th Amendment regarding changes to how pay changes for members of Congress work.
Term limits and ethics codes could be changed by legislation.
In Washington, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, took to calling the proposal “dead on arrival.”
“It is telling that Democrats want to change the system that has guided our nation since its founding simply because they disagree with some of the Court’s recent decisions,” he wrote on social media.
But Biden seemed undeterred. Asked about Johnson’s comments on the tarmac after arriving in Austin, he told reporters: “We’re going to figure a way.” During his speech, Biden said Johnson’s “thinking is dead on arrival.”
Biden’s speech in Austin caps an extraordinary month in presidential politics which included an assassination attempt on Trump during a political rally in Pennsylvania and Biden’s decision, under pressure, to withdraw from the race.
The speech had been planned for July 15 when Biden was under heavy pressure to drop out of the presidential race after a catastrophic performance in a June 27 debate against Trump. But the assassination attempt on Trump two days before the planned speech led to its postponement.
By the time the event was rescheduled, Biden, recovering at home from COVID, had dropped out of the race.
U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a longtime Austin Democrat who was the first member of the party to publicly call on Biden to withdraw from the race, attended the LBJ Library event as a guest of the president.
In a statement on social media welcoming Biden to Austin, Doggett called the president a “true statesman and patriot.”
The event was also attended by Texas congressmen Joaquin Castro of San Antonio, Sylvia Garcia of Houston and Greg Casar of Austin. Austin Mayor Kirk Watson and a slew of state Democrat officials were also in attendance.
Matthew Choi contributed to this report.
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