Harris/Biden Attack Democracy with Assault on the Independence of the Supreme Court

This past week President Biden, with the strong support of VP Kamala Harris, announced what can only be characterized as a reckless and dangerous plan to “reform” the U.S. Supreme Court.    

It amounts to a direct assault on the independence and legitimacy of the judiciary in our constitutional scheme.  It includes term limits for federal judges, increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court above the current number of 9—as has been the case for well over 100 years—to allow for “court packing,” in order to add numerous liberal Democrat justices, and subjecting members of the Court to an ethics standard that “would be enforceable by someone other than the Court itself.” (Wall Street Journal, 7-30-2024).  

Let’s start with the proposed ethics “standard”: it would subject the Court to a broad and manipulable ethics standard which “is an invitation for partisans to besiege the Court with Complaints, however trivial.  If you want to know how that would go, consider that last month the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals stopped accepting duplicative complaints about Judge Aileen Cannon, who is sitting on the Donald Trump documents case. The Court received more than 1,000 complaints in a week as a part of what it called an ‘orchestrated campaign.'” (WSJ). 

Why are Harris/Biden doing this? Because the Left—which often cannot pass its radical legislation into law the appropriate and traditional way, through Congress—has not recently been able to advance its agenda in the U.S. Supreme Court either.  

As we recall, our government is comprised of three branches, the Legislative, Executive and Judicial.  The role of each branch—both their powers and limitations—form the basis of our Separation of Powers which simply means that each of the three branches is required to “stay in its own lane.”  The Framers of our Constitution recognized the tension and friction that would occur between the three branches which is why the Constitution provides for our critically important system of checks and balances. 

Let’s also recall that the role of the Legislative Branch is to “legislate,” to make law in conjunction with a president either signing or vetoing a proposed bill.  The role of the Judicial Branch is to strictly serve as the “referee” between the branches to see that they remain within the confines of their constitutional powers.  As such, it is absolutely not the role of the U.S. Supreme Court or any federal court to make policy or serve as a super legislature, second guessing the political branches.  That’s why what Biden is proposing is so corrosive to the trust Americans must have in the judicial system: he is creating the impression that the courts are nothing more than a third political branch.  

But that’s what the Left is trying to do.  

By packing the Court with additional liberal justices who will outnumber the current court members and by seeking term limits on federal judges even though the Constitution mandates a lifetime appointment, the role of the Supreme Court will be diminished and weakened.  In fact, the very reason the Framers provided federal judges with life tenure and undiminished salary was to remove and insulate them from politics and political pressure.   

If successful, Harris/Biden will ensure that the Supreme Court no longer holds its honorable place as the head of one-third of our government.  To his eternal credit, liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (Ret.) has stated that packing the Court would undermine and harm the public’s perception of the Court and the rule of law.  “Structural alteration motivated by the perception of political influence can only feed that latter perception, further eroding that trust.”

These attacks on the Court are both reckless and a perversion of what our Framers intended as the role of the Supreme Court in our Separation of Powers.  There is nothing more critical to the preservation of our constitutional form of government than the abiding presence of an independent and impartial judiciary.  Nothing.  If a party loses in court, they may be disappointed, but they will accept the results if they believe they had a fair trial and “their day in court.”

If the U.S. Supreme Court is allowed to be trampled and politicized in this way, the esteem in which it must be held by the American people as a neutral and independent arbiter of the law, will be irreparably damaged.  But that’s the goal here and it must be solidly defeated.