US President Joe Biden has announced plans for a radical reform of the country’s powerful Supreme Court. Among other things, the current life-long term of office of Supreme Court judges will be limited to 18 years in the future, the White House announced on Monday. There will also be a binding code of ethics for judges. Biden also wants to reverse the court’s recent decision on former President Donald Trump’s immunity by amending the constitution.
However, given the majority situation in the US Congress, Biden’s plans have no chance of being implemented in the foreseeable future. This would require the approval of Trump’s Republicans, who currently hold the majority in the House of Representatives.
The United States was built on the “simple but profound principle” that no one is above the law, Biden explained his reform plans in an opinion piece for the Washington Post. This includes both the president and the Supreme Court justices. “What is happening right now is not normal and undermines public confidence in the court’s decisions,” Biden criticized.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who will most likely be named the new candidate of the US Democrats in the presidential election in November following Biden’s resignation, expressed her support for Biden’s plans. The Supreme Court is in a “clear crisis of confidence,” she said. The reforms would help “restore confidence in the court, strengthen our democracy and ensure that no one is above the law,” Harris emphasized. She thus made it clear that she intends to continue pursuing the plans if she wins the election.
Biden’s proposals follow several highly controversial decisions by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, including the reversal of the nationwide right to abortion in July 2022 and the decision to grant broad immunity to current and former presidents from criminal prosecution earlier this month. This decision, which came at Trump’s request, was hailed as a great success by the ex-president, who is facing four criminal proceedings.
Biden’s reform concept envisages the introduction of a rotation principle in the nine-member Supreme Court judges’ panel. According to this, the president would nominate a judge every two years for 18-year terms. This would reduce the possibility of “undue influence” being exerted on the court for generations to come during a presidency, the White House explained.
Currently, the Supreme Court has a clear majority of six conservative judges against three left-liberal judges. Three judges were nominated by Trump during his term in office, thereby ensuring the clear dominance of the conservative camp on the court.
Biden wanted to go into more detail about the reform plans in a speech in the US state of Texas later on Monday. He also called for a “mandatory, enforceable” code of ethics for the highest court judges. The behavior of individual Supreme Court judges has caused a stir. The conservative judge Samuel Alito, for example, is being criticized because flags that are also used by fanatical Trump supporters were flying in front of his houses.
The conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also came under pressure – because he allowed a Republican billionaire to treat him to luxury trips and private flights. Thomas also faces doubts about his bipartisanship because of his wife: She is a conservative activist who, in the debate over the 2020 presidential election, adopted Trump’s false claim that his defeat to Biden was due to fraud.
Biden is now demanding, among other things, that Supreme Court judges stay out of cases in which “they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest.”
However, legal expert Steven Schwinn of the University of Illinois at Chicago rates the chances of Biden’s plan being realized as “almost zero.” But the president is probably trying to make the Supreme Court an “election issue,” Schwinn told the AFP news agency.
