President Joe Biden on Friday (April 9) will order a commission to study possible reforms to the Supreme Court, including whether to expand the number of justices or set term limits for the justices. That’s a key goal for members of the Democratic Party’s left wing.
According to a White House statement Friday, the executive order would create “a presidential commission on the U.S. Supreme Court composed of bipartisan experts on the courts and court reform debates.”
The White House said the panel would be made up of former federal judges and lawyers who have argued before the Supreme Court, as well as “advocates for democratic institutions and judicial reform,” and that “the expertise represented on the commission would include constitutional law, history and political science.”
Calls for an expanded Supreme Court culminated late last year after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Then-President Donald Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court after he appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, tilting the Court 6-3 in favor of conservatives.
The Biden-created panel will be led by Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel to former President Barack Obama, and Cristina Rodriguez, a Yale Law School professor who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama administration’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department.
Bauer, who has long advocated term limits for Supreme Court justices, wrote for the Washington Post in 2005 that “in our system of government, we typically constrain great power with limits, not license it to be exercised indefinitely.”
He also previously worked at Perkins Coie law firm, which has a long history of working for Democrats on election law and was involved in the Russia-Trump “dossier” controversy several years ago. Bauer left Perkins Coie in 2019, according to the firm.
Last fall, Biden proposed a presidential commission during his presidential campaign, in part as an alternative to the “Court Packing” efforts of some left-leaning members of the Democratic Party to change the internal factional balance of power by adding more justices to the Supreme Court. Republicans in Congress warned that expanding the Supreme Court would allow Biden to appoint justices that would give the Court a left-wing bias, while Democrats said the Senate, led by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), blocked the confirmation of Merrick Garland to the Court. when Republicans acted unfairly.
“This is not about (Supreme) filling the (Supreme) Court,” Biden said at the time in response to a question, “There are other things that our constitutional scholars have debated. …… The last thing we need to do is turn the Supreme Court into a political soccer, where whoever has the most votes gets what they want. Presidents come and go, and Supreme Court justices stay for generations.”
More than three dozen others have been appointed to the commission, according to a White House statement Friday.
This week, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer warned against filling out the (Supreme) Court.
“In the abstract, the power of the Supreme Court, like the power of any court, must depend on the public’s willingness to respect its decisions, even those with which they disagree, even when they believe a decision is seriously wrong.” Breyer, a liberal Supreme Court appointee of former President Bill Clinton, said.
“If the public views judges as ‘politicians in robes,’ then its confidence in the court and in the rule of law itself can only diminish, weakening the court’s power, including the power to act as a ‘check and balance’ on the other branches. ” He added.
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