WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Monday proposed major reforms to the U.S. Supreme Court: enforceable ethics rules, term limits for judges and a constitutional amendment to restrict the justices’ recent decisions on presidential immunity.
With Election Day looming, there is little chance the proposal will pass the narrowly divided Congress, but the idea could spark debate with public trust that the Supreme Court will rule on it. Lowest in history The move comes amid revelations about ethical issues surrounding some judges, as well as controversy over the presidential election and growing anger among Democrats over recent decisions by the conservative-majority Supreme Court.
Here we explain how the idea works and what obstacles you might encounter.
How are judges’ terms limited?
Polls show that limiting the term limits of Supreme Court justices is broadly popular among Americans.
poll The Associated Press-NORC Center A July 2022 Public Affairs Research poll found that 67% of Americans, including 82% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans, support the proposal to set judges’ terms at a specific number of years instead of life sentences.
Biden’s proposal would limit justices’ terms to 18 years, a system he argues would make appointments more predictable and less arbitrary and reduce the chance that a single president would control the Supreme Court for generations to come.
There’s a big problem: The Constitution gives all federal judges life terms unless they resign, retire, or are removed from office.
Charles Gay, a law professor at Indiana University and an expert on judicial ethics, said there are some ideas about how to impose term limits without amendment, but if such a law were passed and challenged in court, it’s unclear what the justices might ultimately rule on it.
How will the Code of Ethics be enforced?
The Supreme Court had no formal code of ethics. Until last year, when a judge handed down one sentence. They have faced continuing criticism over private trips and gifts from wealthy benefactors to some justices, such as Clarence Thomas.
The law still lacks enforcement measures, which Biden has called “common sense.” For example, members of Congress generally cannot accept gifts worth more than $50.
Anyone can file a complaint against another federal judge, subjecting that judge to a censure or reprimand. Justice Elena Kagan expressed support In a public appearance last week, he said he would add enforcement mechanisms to the Supreme Court’s ethics code.
Still, making the Supreme Court’s ethics code enforceable raises troubling questions about how it would be enforced and by whom.
Lower courts have said disciplinary procedures are not intended to directly police the ethics code, arguing that the code’s language is too broad so violations don’t directly lead to discipline, Gay said.
The ethics code is overseen by a judicial conference led by Chief Justice John Roberts, who “may be reluctant to exercise conference power over his colleagues,” Steven Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University School of Law, said in an email.
What about presidential immunity?
Biden also wants to seek a constitutional change to limit recent Supreme Court decisions that gave former President Donald Trump and all other presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution.
The amendment “would make clear that former presidents have no immunity for crimes committed while in office,” Biden wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post. “We are a nation of laws, not kings or dictators.”
Gay said this isn’t the first time this has happened: The Constitution has been amended about five times in U.S. history to overturn Supreme Court decisions.
But a constitutional amendment faces even higher hurdles: It would need to be supported by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, plus three-quarters of each state’s legislature.
No new amendment has passed in more than three decades. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson called Biden’s proposal “a dangerous gambit that will die on the way to the House.”
Biden has resisted other calls for reform of the Supreme Court.
Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has long resisted calls for reform of the Supreme Court.
In 2021, he fulfilled his election promise; Convene a committee o Consider potential changes to the court. It was not tasked with making recommendations and warned that excessive changes could undermine democracy.
The latest proposal comes years after Democrats are growing increasingly angry over Supreme Court decisions that overturned landmark cases on abortion rights and federal regulatory power, and amid a hotly contested presidential election underway against President Donald Trump.
Even if Biden’s plan is unlikely to pass, it could attract voters’ attention. It was also backed by Vice President Kamala Harris, who endorsed Biden after he dropped out of the presidential race.
But conservatives like activist Leonard Leo have denounced the move, saying in a statement: “This is Democrats trying to destroy a court they don’t agree with.”
