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Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has given Joe Biden a terse warning over the president’s plans to shake up the structure of the Supreme Court.
“I just say: Be careful,” Gorsuch told Fox News Sunday.
The justice, appointed by Donald Trump, did not weigh in directly about Biden’s proposed term limits and other reforms for the court, saying it would not be “helpful” during an election year, but emphasized how important it is for the high court to remain independent.
“If you’re in the majority, you don’t need judges and juries, to hear you, to protect your rights, if you’re popular,” Gorsuch added in the interview. “It’s there for the moments when the spotlight’s on you — when the government’s coming after you. And don’t you want a ferociously independent judge and a jury of your peers to make those decisions?”
In a separate interview with The New York Times, Gorsuch again demurred from talking about the Biden plan but suggested he won’t stay on the high court forever.
“I look forward to a few years of fly fishing,” he said.
Last week, Biden unveiled a plan to reform the Supreme Court, which has suffered from record-low approval ratings and a string of leaks and ethics scandals in recent years.
The president has called for legislation that would create a new system ending Supreme Court justices’ lifetime appointments, and replacing them with justices who are appointed every two years to serve an 18-year term.
Biden also called for a binding code of ethics, an expansion on an internal code of ethics the court adopted last year, as well as an amendment stripping presidents of criminal immunity, a response to a July decision in a case about the Trump plot to overturn the 2020 election granting him immunity for “official” acts in office.
The proposal would be the largest change in the court’s structure in more than 150 years after Congress formally adopted the nine-justice system we use today.
Other presidents, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, have tried to change the structure of the court but were unsuccessful.
Biden once called FDR’s court-packing plan a “boneheaded” idea, and as recently as 2022, said he didn’t support changing the nature of the court.
Some justices on the high court have signaled an openness to the changes.
Elena Kagan, at a recent meeting of federal judges, said that the court’s internal ethics code, adopted in November, may not be robust enough.
“The thing that can be criticized is: Rules usually have enforcement mechanisms attached to them, and this set of rules does not,” she said.
“It’s a hard thing to do to figure out who exactly should be doing this and what kinds of sanctions would be appropriate for violations of the rules, but I feel as though we, however hard it is, that we could and should try to figure out some mechanism for doing this.”
