Editors at National Review Online lament one of President Biden’s latest harmful actions.
Court-packing is a menace, no matter how it comes dressed. The Senate Judiciary Committee warned that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 proposal to change the structure of the Supreme Court in order to alter its decisions “should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.”
Let us remember that in response to Joe Biden’s latest attack on our system of independent, life-tenured federal courts. The guardians of our Constitution have been guarding it too well lately, and progressives are furious. They have spent years now assailing the public reputation of the Court and trying to intimidate its members. Some Democrats in Congress have openly proposed Court-packing. A desperate and cornered Biden, fighting just to keep his party’s nomination, is finally caving to demands to dismantle the Court as an obstacle to progressive goals.
In Justice Antonin Scalia’s words, this wolf comes as a wolf. Over the weekend, Biden reportedly told the Congressional Progressive Caucus that he was about to unveil “a major initiative on limiting the Court.” Limiting is perhaps an unintentionally revealing word choice. It is said that Biden is advised by retired Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, who has counseled him in prior violations of the Constitution that the Court had to stop, and whose public commentary these days marinates in conspiratorial hyperbole. While the details are as yet undisclosed, the plan is said to include “legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code.”
The aim of both of these proposals is to accomplish the goal of Court-packing by other means — change the composition of the current Court by changing the system to force current justices off the bench. Nobody has the slightest illusion that these proposals emanate from anything other than the fact that there’s a conservative majority on the Court.
