US President Joe Biden on Monday got down to business with the first of the pending issues for the six months he has left in the White House. He did so with the publication of an opinion piece in The Washington Post in which he put in writing his intention to promote legislative changes in the Supreme Court, and, in the afternoon, he reiterated those ideas at an event at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. It was his first public appearance since he announced his decision to end his reelection campaign a couple of Sundays ago.
Biden has two ambitious proposals for the Supreme Court: limiting the term of office of its nine judges, who now enjoy a life contract, to a maximum of 18 years, and creating an ethical code to govern their performance. In the text, and in Austin, the Democratic politician also advocated for the approval of a constitutional amendment entitled “No one is above the law” that would limit the immunity of former presidents.
Given that all this requires the consensus of a fiercely divided Congress, which is highly unlikely in an election year, the gesture is a bit of a no-brainer, especially with regard to the amendment, because the requirements of the American system to get something like this done are enormous. It has been 32 years since the approval of the 27th amendment, and 53 since the previous one was passed.
The memory of the assault on the Capitol
The text of the Post It begins: “This nation was founded on a simple but profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a Supreme Court justice. No one.” Biden then criticizes the high court’s recent decision to grant the White House tenant partial immunity for his actions in office, a ruling issued in response to a request from Donald Trump’s lawyers in the case against the tycoon in Washington for his attempts to reverse the 2020 election result.
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“If a future president incites a violent mob to storm the Capitol and stop the peaceful transfer of power, as we saw on January 6, 2021, there may be no legal consequences. And that is just the beginning,” writes Biden, who proposes the constitutional amendment in his article with the following argument: “We are a nation of laws, not kings or dictators.”
“I have great respect for our institutions and the separation of powers that our Constitution establishes,” Biden added in Austin, at an event scheduled to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, one of the great achievements of the presidency of Johnson, who, like Biden, decided not to run for re-election seven months before the 1968 elections, which the Democrats lost. “What is happening now is not consistent with that doctrine of separation of powers. Extremism is undermining public confidence in the decisions of the [alto] court”.
To justify the urgency of reforming the Supreme Court – composed of three liberal judges and six conservatives (three of whom were appointed by Trump) – Biden, who defines the decisions of these nine judges as “dangerous and extreme”, cites the “ethical crisis” in which the court “is mired”.
The president is referring to scandals over undeclared gifts received by Justice Clarence Thomas from people with interests in cases heard by the court, as well as conflicts related to the apparent support of Samuel Alito’s wife for the January 6 insurrectionists. According to US media reports in the spring, the couple flew an upside-down American flag at their two residences around the time of the assault on the Capitol, a time when the symbol was popular among those arguing that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democratic Party.
“What is happening now is not normal and undermines public confidence in the court’s decisions, including those that affect personal liberties,” Biden writes in his article. The Supreme Court, which is considered in theory to be free from partisan squabbling, has the worst levels of trust among Americans in its history. That leads the president to conclude: “All three reforms are supported by a majority of Americans, as well as by conservative and liberal constitutional scholars.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, a likely candidate in the November elections, made public her support for the president’s initiative in the late morning. Trump, for his part, denounced the Post article as “an illegal and unconstitutional attack on our SACRED Supreme Court,” he wrote in a post on his social network, Truth.
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