President Joe Biden has announced a plan to “reform the Supreme Court” by advocating for a constitutional amendment, term limits on Supreme Court justices, and a binding, enforceable code of conduct. Critics call the proposal a dangerous subversion of the Constitution.
In an op-ed for Fox News, First Liberty President and CEO Kelly Shackleford and former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr wrote, “The left continues these moves to take over the Supreme Court because they are angry about recent decisions that have not gone their way.”
In fact, Biden cited the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade—allowing states to make their own laws concerning abortion—as an example of a “dangerous” and “extreme” decision that “overturn[ed] settled legal precedents.”
Barr and Shackleford continued, “To protect religious freedom and all of our cherished liberties, judges must be able to make decisions without fear of partisan retribution from the executive or legislative branches.”
Many say these reforms would turn the Supreme Court into a political tool as opposed to a body meant to objectively rule based on the law and the Constitution. House Speaker Mike Johnson and others predict that the proposals will not have the majority approval they would need in Congress in order to go anywhere.
Johnson posted on X: “President Biden’s proposal to radically overhaul the U.S. Supreme Court would tilt the balance of power and erode not only the rule of law, but the American people’s faith in our system of justice. … 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. This dangerous gambit of the Biden-Harris Administration is dead on arrival in the House.”
In a guest opinion piece in The Washington Post, Biden proposed what he calls the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment,” which would declare that a former president of the U.S. has no immunity whatsoever for crimes committed while in office, either official acts or unofficial acts.
Legal expert and Regent University professor Brad Jacob told CBN News that if the president has no immunity, prosecutors around the country could attempt to bring criminal charges against the president for official decisions with which they disagree. “A president defending (against) criminal charges for making the decisions for which we pay him or her, to make the tough decisions, that’s crazy,” he said.
This comes after a July 1 Supreme Court ruling in former President Donald Trump’s case that concluded “the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.” That immunity does not extend to areas of shared authority with Congress, the court ruled.
“The President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “But Congress may not criminalize the President’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the Executive Branch under the Constitution.”
Biden also proposed term limits of 18 years for Supreme Court justices, who currently have lifetime seats; justices would be appointed by the president every two years.
Finally, the president called the court’s current code of ethics “weak and self-enforced,” and proposed a binding and enforceable code of ethics.
“Don’t be fooled,” said Kristen Waggoner, Alliance Defending Freedom CEO, president and general counsel. “This move by President Biden has nothing to do with protecting the court and has everything to do with the Left’s desire to dominate every institution in society. And today that means launching political broadside attacks on our independent judiciary. Those attacks must be rejected.”
Waggoner explained that the U.S. was founded to have separation of powers into three independent branches—one of them being the judicial branch, which consists of the Supreme Court and other federal courts.
“President Biden’s proposal to ‘reform’ the Supreme Court undermines this essential principle,” she said. “Under the guise of protecting democracy, he would politicize and discredit the court by placing it firmly under the thumb of the political branches. And he would do so, ironically, because of his dissatisfaction with decisions by the court that defend separation of powers but that he disagrees with on political grounds.”
