The White House plans to continue President Joe Biden’s push for sweeping reforms of the U.S. Supreme Court during his final months in office, despite the proposal having little chance of passing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
“What we welcome is a debate,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in response to VOA’s question during her briefing Tuesday.
Jean-Pierre said there is broad public support for reform of the court. She sidestepped questions on whether the proposal is mainly a messaging strategy ahead of the November presidential election rather than a legislative goal for Biden, who is not seeking reelection.
“As many times as the president introduced legislation, or some ideas of how the direction of the legislation that’s important to the American people, we see a healthy debate,” she said.
On Monday, Biden urged Congress to eliminate lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices and establish a system in which the sitting president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in service on the court.
His proposal would “reduce the chance that any single president imposes undue influence for generations to come,” Biden said.
Under the American political system, presidents appoint justices who are confirmed by the U.S. Senate and serve on the Supreme Court until they die or resign. The highest court of the land provides the final word on legal interpretations of the U.S. Constitution.
Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson dismissed the plan as part of Democrats’ “ongoing efforts to delegitimize the Supreme Court.”
“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 said in a statement. “This dangerous gambit of the Biden-Harris Administration is dead on arrival in the House.”
Biden’s proposal 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,” he added.
Six of the nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican presidents, including three by former President Donald Trump.
Biden also wants legislation to establish an enforceable ethics code for the court’s nine justices. Currently, the justices are free to police themselves under ethics rules that were put in place last year following revelations that Justice Clarence Thomas had received expensive gifts from Republican donors and that the wife of Justice Samuel Alito flew two flags often used by followers of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.
The ethics part of the proposal is “the most politically feasible,” said Claire Finkelstein, professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Penn Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ failure to discipline his own members “cast great reproachment on the court,” and makes it “illegitimate to a large degree,” she told VOA, adding that there may be bipartisan support “to rescue the court from its own problematic conduct.”
The third part of Biden’s reform proposal requires lawmakers to ratify a constitutional amendment limiting presidential immunity.
An amendment would reverse the court’s recent landmark ruling in favor of Trump that presidents are allowed some immunity from criminal prosecution for acts conducted while in office.
“This nation was founded on the principle there are no kings in America,” Biden said. “Each of us are equal before the law. No one is above the law. For all practical purposes, the court’s decision almost certainly means the president can violate their oath, flout our laws, and face no consequences.”
Messaging push
Passage of the proposal seem unlikely in light of Republican control of House and the Democrats’ slim majority in the Senate.
Passage of a constitutional amendment requires two-thirds support in both congressional chambers, or approval by two-thirds of the states at a special convention. Either way, it would then need to be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures.
Biden’s proposal is “both a messaging push and a warning to the Roberts court to clean up its act,” said Democratic Party strategist Julie Roginsky.
“It underscores the fact that the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have posed a grave threat to democracy and that the next president will have an opportunity to shape the court and, with it, the future of our democracy,” she told VOA.
Only 41% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Supreme Court, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in June.
American confidence in the Supreme Court has declined in recent years as more people see the institution as partisan. A majority of Americans (53%) say that they think Supreme Court justices rule mainly on the basis of their partisan political views, according to a 2023 poll by ABC News/Ipsos, up 10 percentage points from 2022.
Various polls show that voters of both parties are in favor of term limits for justices, including a Fox News poll in July that show most Americans strongly favor mandatory retirement.
“Biden’s proposals bundle some of the most popular reforms while avoiding some of the more politically divisive,” said Chris Jackson, senior vice president at Ipsos, referring to a court-packing proposal pushed by some progressives that would expand the size of the Supreme Court to quickly eliminate the court’s lean to the right.
“It remains to be seen if this will be an effective campaign message for the Harris campaign heading into the election,” he told VOA.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, backed Biden’s proposal on Monday.
“President Biden and I strongly believe that the American people must have confidence in the Supreme Court,” she said in a statement. “Yet today, there is a clear crisis of confidence facing the Supreme Court as its fairness has been called into question after numerous ethics scandals and decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent.”
Trump, meanwhile, dismissed it.
“It’s going nowhere,” he said in a Fox News interview Monday. “He knows that, too.”
VOA’s Kim Lewis contributed to this report.
