Biden still has plans to shore up “our democracy” though SCOTUS “reform”
The Supreme Court needs the Biden touch:
In Biden’s latest blatant lawfare attack on Democrats’ top political opponent, he used these examples from a routinely unanimous court as a springboard to argue for amending the U.S. Constitution so that “there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office.” The First Family’s history of evading accountability suggests the “No President Is Above the Law” pledge would presumably not affect the patriarch of the Biden family’s international influence-peddling scheme. …
Biden proposed in the pages of a publication known for smearing Republican-nominated justices and their families the enactment of “more predictable and less arbitrary” term limits for members of the high court.
“It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come. I support a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court,” the Biden article argues.
The president did not explain exactly how he planned to do so. The White House’s eager endorsement of a 2023 Democrat-led bill to enact 18-year term limits and forced retirement for senior justices like John Roberts and Clarence Thomas, however, suggests the Biden administration plans to use its connections in Congress to do his bidding.
Much more at the link.
Biden – or whoever is behind this proposal – doesn’t expect this to happen prior to the 2024 election. It’s a blueprint for the next steps if the Democrats manage, by hook or by crook, to win in 2024 and to control Congress. The fact that the Supreme Court is one of the remaining institutions that isn’t wholly controlled by the left sticks in their craws. If they come to power again, that will change.
Other things will happen, too, because the left doesn’t give up; it merely postpones. There’s HR1, the federalization of relaxed voting security. There’s the push to make DC a state, as well as Puerto Rico. There’s plenty more, but those are the two that come to mind.
I want SCOTUS to impose a binding ethics code on Congress and the Executive Branch.
1. No trading of individual stocks.
2. Full disclosure of all crypto accounts.
3. No bribes paid to the office holder or their families.
Why is Biden bringing this up now? Does his party feel confident they can ram these changes through before anyone notices?
OTOH, it’s said that Biden is still angry and resentful at the way he was unceremoniously shown the door. Maybe this is his way of giving Kamala and his party the middle finger, by bringing up a proposal that is likely to terrify right-leaning voters and ensure that they are engaged and turn out.
I figured it was a get-out-the-vote effort. Obviously isn’t going anywhere soon.
Doesn’t this require a constitutional amendment? If so, DOA. No way the Ds get enough states on board
The ventriloquist’s dummy speaks!
I believe this would have to be done as a Constitutional amendment. The Constitution makes the Supreme Court a separate, independent branch of government that does not answer to Congress or the Executive branch. It would never pass. (She said confidently . . . and then remembered all the other things she was sure would never happen, but now have.)
I don’t think the Biden admin. has any hope or expectation of actually passing this. It’s a bid for votes from the far left, just as the student loan executive orders were bids for votes from that demographic, that Biden (or whoever is puppeteering Biden) knew would never really come to pass.
I have been concerned that there is no check on the Supreme Court. In theory, there is impeachment, but in today’s environment, that’s an idle threat.
As I read the constitution, term limits would require an amendment, but I’m not a lawyer and don’t play one on TV.
I would go for an amendment that provided 10 or 12 year term limits, renewable once if the current president chooses to re-nominate the justice, not applicable to current Supreme Court Justices.
But the bigger problem with the current US government is the civil service. That’s what needs reform.
Ed Driscoll quoting at Instapundit: https://instapundit.com/663747/
Biden, or what’s left of him, was in Austin today. I thought about going to the event just to see in person how decrepit he’s gotten. I’ve hated him since the late 80s, it’s not very Christian of me to want to do that, but eff him.
I watched most of his speech as it was my nap time and the TV was on. He got through OK but showed some of his senility, too. As it went along his voice got lower and eventually he was nearly whispering. At the end he seemed to be done with his script and began to free lance, which must terrify his handlers.
When you start to feel sorry for this old man he does this.
If I could wave a magic wand I might have overlapping fixed terms for Supreme Court Justices, maybe so that one retires two years so that every President gets two and every Senate cohort gets one. And I think Congress should consider using its Article III Section 2 power to define the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court a little differently, as well as who has standing for what kinds of cases. But unlike Biden I’m not trying implement my policy prescriptions through the courts or tie the hands of future governments dominated by the other party.
Interesting how the Biden administration supported the Israeli protest movement against Netanyahu’s efforts at Supreme Court reform, but now wants to make political hay out of doing the same to the US Supreme Court. As we all know the left is never held to account for inconsistency and hypocrisy.
Lifetime tenure was supposed to insulate the justices from bribery, from doing favors for litigants in hopes of getting favors in return after they retire. Biden claims he wants higher ethical standards for the justices, but the result of his plan might well be much lower conduct by those on the bench.
And c’mon. Biden was a Senator for 36 years. That’s twice 18, and he’s been in DC politics for 51 years (including the brief four year hiatus). I’d hold up on term limits for justices and judges until representatives and senators get them.
neo correctly observes that, “the left doesn’t give up; it merely postpones”
It is inarguable that the left’s ideological imperatives cannot but result in tyranny because the utopia they envision is unsustainable without increasingly severe coercion.
In an armed society, history has demonstrated what happens when tyranny becomes intolerable. One ‘trigger wire’ for armed conflict would be if the left attains the political power to act upon its belief that there are no God ordained inalienable rights, no “self-evident truths”. Only State approved privileges that are subject to nullification through the constitutional amendment process.
“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people you don’t even know that fire is hot…” George Orwell
The left’s activists and elite’s ideological blinders prevent them from realizing that they are sawing off the ‘branch’ of Western Civilization upon which they sit. Perhaps never have so many been so blind.
When the Bill of Rights was being debated, the anti-Federalists wanted rotation-in-office = term limits on the Senators and Congressmen. Should have done it then, it limits the graft.
Seems a good time to repeat my earlier suggestion for modified term limits, with supermajority voting. The goal is to keep good people and remove slackers/frauds.
E.g.: House reps get 4 terms as normal, but 5th election they have to win by 55 or 57%; next election by 65%, next 72%, and so on, if they are really that good and that popular. Eventually this reduces the power of incumbency and incentivizes more challengers.
E.g.: Senators get 2 terms, then 3rd and later elections follow same or more severe supermajority %’s as for the House reps [e.g., 60% and 70% since they (still) serve for 6 year terms?].
I gather some states have (nominally nonpartisan) elections to “retain” their SC justices, where the term of service varies. This is probably not a good idea for the federal SCOTUS, as it would end up being all to partisan in the end.
But if implemented, maybe have 10 year terms, with 60% supermajority for 2nd term and 70% for 3rd term ????
All of above still need constitutional amendments, of course, but possibly achieved via a convention of the states to bypass resistance in the Congress to these ideas.
Brandon said something?
FJB.
The Puppet has no where to go, so might as well use him to destroy what’s left of the Constitution
People, please! Stop thinking that “Biden” is proposing anything; he has not been and will not ever be anything but the front man for the group of Obama leftovers who continue to want to “radically transform” America. Biden is the puppet whose strings are pulled by his masters. He is The Mighty and Powerful Oz who, like the Oz in L. Frank Baum’s tale is eventually exposed as a chimera controlled by behind-the-scenes actors. He is a mouthpiece who reads–barely– off a teleprompter what his controllers have written for him and when he extemporizes, it is nothing but venal, vain boasts about his physical prowess, or of his bravery and all his fictitious achievements, except for when he blabs and blabbers unintelligible verbal droolings. We are not in a fight with “Biden.” We are in an existential fight with forces who are currently ascendant and desirous of overthrowing traditional America and all for which it stands, replacing it with a Maduro-like leftist/communist authoritarian totalitarianism. Analyzing “Biden’s” moves, motives and public pronouncements is a chump’s game unless one realizes and identifies the source. And the same holds true for the next avatar of those same leftist/communist ideologues, the utterly exerable Kamala Harris, who has been chosen as Biden’s successor because she is as vacuous, vain, stupid and willing to do as told as her predecessor.
The judiciary has not, since 1937, attempted to enforce constitutional principles with any consistency and rigor. In important respects, they’ve been the enemy of them. An interesting exception in the last 20 years has been that all levels of the judiciary stopped pretending that ‘the right of the people’ in the 2d Amendment refers to anything but a personal right. This irritates partisan Democrats in fora like this (and on faculties). Another exception arose two years ago when the court over-ruled its 49 years of bad precedents and said that the state legislatures have the discretion to set policy on abortion. This is perfectly obvious, but liberals have been lying to themselves for so long it just generates emotional responses.
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These aside, the Democratic elite and their street-level dupes are irritated-to-enraged that their exists potential impediments to the crimes they wish to commit. The judiciary is one (albeit their resistance is spotty and they’re criminals themselves now and again), clean elections are another. Widespread gun ownership is a third. The apportionment of the Senate is not one and neither is gerrymandering, but they lie to themselves anyway about that.
the punk in the dunce cap read it wrong
https://www.thefp.com/p/president-biden-supreme-court-reforms-july-2024
its their fault for handing him a loaded b b gun
On another site I saw the opinion that this was indeed DOA, and that it is simply political theater, no need to worry.
But, this bit of theater makes legislative and executive control of SCOTUS an official idea; one that might be delayed but not destroyed.
This idea will resurface from time to time until Congress is overwhelmingly Democrat controlled.