The Biden administration will create a commission aimed at reforming the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, and nine to 15 people are expected to be appointed to the commission. Outsiders have questioned whether this may be the Biden Administration‘s way of preparing for an increase in the number of Supreme Court justices.
The committee will be housed under the White House counsel’s office and coordinated behind the scenes by Biden campaign lawyer Bob Bauer, Politico reported.
The committee is expected to include Yale law professor and Obama-era deputy assistant attorney general Cristina Rodríguez and former U.S. Constitution Society president Caroline Fredrickson, people familiar with the matter told the outlet. In addition, Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and former Bush-era assistant attorney general, has been invited to join the commission.
Politico notes that Fredrickson has said in the past that she favors court reform, saying in a 2019 interview, “I often point out to people who are not lawyers that the Supreme Court is not defined in the Constitution as a ‘nine-person body’ and that its size has changed many times .”
Rodriguez’s views on court reform are less clear. However, Goldsmith, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, does not support Trump and is a friend and co-author of Bauer.
Bauer does not plan to enter the executive branch full-Time, but he himself is a supporter of term limits for the justices.
Last October, Biden said in a media interview that he planned to form a commission to study court reform, but he said at the time that the commission had nothing to do with “court packing” (i.e., increasing the number of judges on federal courts).
Biden said at the time, “If I’m elected, I will form a national commission of bipartisan scholars, constitutional scholars.”
“I would ask them to come back to me within 180 days with recommendations on how to reform the court system, because the way the court system has been handled has been dysfunctional. And it’s not about ‘stuffing the courts,’ there are other things that our constitutional scholars have debated, and I’ve looked at what that commission might recommend.”
The “stuffing the court” issue came to the fore after Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court to replace the recently deceased Ruth Bader Ginsburg led to a 6-3 conservative majority on the justices. The issue of “court stuffing” came to the forefront.
The fear is that after the Democrats take control of the White House and the House and Senate, they may pass a bill to increase the number of Supreme Court seats and appoint liberal justices to turn the situation around. In this way, whenever there is a change of power, both parties may try to increase the number of justices in order to influence some of the most important issues of debate in American politics, such as abortion, gun control to presidential power.
In a statement, the White House said, “The president has pledged to bring in experts to study and debate court reform and to issue additional comments in the coming weeks.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Monday (Jan. 25) that he is waiting for Biden’s committee to decide the path of Supreme Court reform.
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