With Supreme Court reform ideas, Biden is playing the long game

The Supreme Court with a statue in the foreground

July 29, 2024 3:04 PM PT

The first and easiest question to answer with respect to the package of Supreme Court reform measures that President Biden announced Monday is whether there is any hope of their passage or enactment by the current Congress.

There is not.

With Congress hopelessly polarized and the Supreme Court hopelessly politicized, there is no chance of action on Biden’s proposals in the coming months, and the administration well understands that point.

Indeed, before Biden even unveiled them in a speech at the LBJ Presidential Library in Texas, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson pronounced them “dead on arrival.”

Why then choose now to introduce them? After all, Biden has steadfastly resisted pleas from progressives to try to reform the court — and he has been under pressure since he took office, because President Trump had just tilted the court to the right by appointing three justices.

The straightforward explanation for the timing is to make the Supreme Court, now quite possibly the most unpopular of all federal governmental institutions, a focus of the election, which would presumably nudge voters toward Vice President Kamala Harris.

It was no surprise (and presumably exactly what Biden and Harris wished) when Trump came out with a strident defense of the court.

But the proposals shouldn’t be dismissed as a mere political gesture. Biden and the Democrats are also playing the long game, looking in particular to make the court a campaign issue. Then if they win control of both chambers and the White House, they can portray their election as a mandate for substantial reforms.

Biden’s proposals are in three basic areas. First, ethics, responding to the series of scandals involving eyebrow-raising or nakedly partisan conduct by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Second, time of service and method of appointment, which Biden proposes be changed to 18 years per justice and a fixed allotment of two new justices per presidential term. And third, the court’s recent, stunningly broad immunity opinion in the Jan. 6 Trump prosecution brought by the Justice Department.

Biden announced the reforms in a Washington Post op-ed that, interestingly, led with the immunity decision, which Biden wrote transgressed a bedrock principle of the nation: “No one is above the law.”

Indeed it does, but Biden and Harris, who was quick to endorse the proposals, obviously have calculated that of all the court’s recent unpopular moves, the immunity decision most offends the most American voters who might swing toward Harris.

Biden’s proposal recognizes that the decision can be overcome only by a constitutional amendment. I think that’s dubious; a careful reading of the Supreme Court’s sweeping immunity decision suggests it is ultimately anchored in perceived good government principles dressed up as constitutional law.

The problem here, as in one way or another with all the proposals, is the firmly entrenched principle that the Supreme Court has the last word. (One thinks of Justice Robert Jackson’s famous line “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.”)

So that leaves the famously cumbersome process of a constitutional amendment, which requires either two-thirds of both houses or the states to request and three-quarters of the states to ratify.

The most recent constitutional amendment, the 27th, took more than 200 years to ratify. The Equal Rights Amendment, which was first proposed in 1923 to guarantee the rights of Americans regardless of their sex, still has not passed.

The ethics provision of the Biden package probably has the strongest chance of passing. It is conspicuous that the Supreme Court justices — alone among government officials — get to make and apply their own rules on issues such as whether they can take or must disclose gifts from parties who may have an agenda with the court. Although the court adopted ethics rules for itself last fall, they have no teeth. Justice Elena Kagan just last week called for the rules to be subject to an enforcement regime other than the justices themselves.

But in my view, the most important component of Biden’s package is his proposal to change Supreme Court terms from lifetime to 18 years, and, with the consistent rhythm of that span, guarantee each president precisely two appointments.

The design of the reform is to obviate the Armageddon quality of current confirmation battles. Lifetime appointments create very high stakes, leading to carefully curated fairly young nominees who can serve 40 years or more and have enormous, longstanding influence, as with the relatively young cadre of Trump appointees.

Term limits would prevent the imbalance that results if one president makes many appointments and others make few. Democrats are understandably frustrated at the bad luck — and GOP obstructionism — that allowed Republican presidents to choose six of the current nine justices, in a country in which more people identify as Democrats than as Republicans and in which Democratic presidential candidates have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections.

This proposal would do nothing to alleviate the current imbalance. Progressives had been pushing Biden to instead propose four additional seats on the court to undo the current uber-conservative hammerlock. The Constitution permits such an expansion, but the history of FDR’s court packing plan and similar efforts obviously persuaded Biden that the approach would freight the package with political controversy and long odds that would diminish the clean appeal of the rest of the provisions.

As for the court, today’s proposals only reinforce the grave loss of confidence it has brought on with its own overreaching. As a matter of raw power, it can continue on its path and remain oblivious to its many self-inflicted wounds. But Supreme Court history teaches that whatever its recognized authority in individual cases, it is untenable for it to operate indefinitely so against the grain of the American people.

As Alito said in an overheard comment, “one side or the other is going to win.”

Harry Litman is the host of the “Talking Feds” podcast and the “Talking San Diego” speaker series. @harrylitman