AUSTIN, Texas—The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling giving Donald Trump almost absolute immunity forever for federal crimes he committed in and out of the White House is a big reason for wide reform of the High Court, Democratic President Joe Biden says.
As might be expected, progressive groups, including those dedicated to court reform, cheered, but House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and radical Trumpite Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the Judiciary Committee which would consider such measures, pronounced Biden’s plan dead on arrival.
“For all practical purposes, the court’s decision almost certainly means that the president can violate the oath” of office, “flout our laws, and face no consequences,” Biden told a crowd at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, on July 29. “Folks, just imagine what a president could do trampling civil rights and liberties, given such immunity.
“This nation was founded on the principle there are no kings in America. Each of us legally follows the law. No one is above the law.
“Extremism is undermining the public confidence in the court’s decisions,” said Biden, understating the case. Polls show more than two-thirds of responders believe the justices vote their ideologies, not the law. In other words, they believe, despite what Trump-named Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied in a speech last year, that the justices “are partisan political hacks.”
Biden proposed term limits for the justices, with nominations on a rotating basis so one president—in this case, Trump—could not literally pack the court by appointing a slew of ideologues. Term limits, however, might require a constitutional amendment, just as the GOP-passed 22nd Amendment limited a president to a maximum of two full terms in office.
Biden also demanded a binding and enforceable code of ethics for the justices. Two of the Republican-named justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, have massive ethics problems.
But one reform Biden did not mention was to expand the size of the court—something that Congress can do by passing a law. To achieve that, though, Democrats who support expanding the bench must hold the Senate and abolish the filibuster there, win the House, and hold the presidency too.
Received millions of dollars
Justice Thomas has received millions of dollars in free travel, memberships, meals, and more from a GOP big giver, and his wife lobbied the Trump White House in favor of the Trumpites who–as Trump ordered–invaded and pillaged the U.S. Capitol three and a half years ago in a pro-Trump coup attempt. Justice Alito flew flags at his home showing support for the invaders.
Trump named Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the bench. All were part of the six-justice majority that voted immunity for Trump.
Supreme Court reform was an issue progressives never paid much attention to until the court’s Republican majority overturned the federal constitutional right to abortion two years ago. It now joins the overall Trumpite threat to the U.S. Constitution, the who-has-the-better-economy debate, and the Israeli war on Gaza as top issues on this year’s campaign trail.
Biden spoke at a ceremony honoring the 60th anniversary of Johnson’s signing of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act—a law produced by popular pressure led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with a big assist from the Auto Workers and legendary organizer Bayard Rustin.
But it also took some Johnsonian arm-twisting to overcome a Southern Democratic Senate filibuster. The next year, LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act. The current Republican Supreme Court majority largely gutted that law, more than a decade ago.
The public turning point for the progressives, including organized labor, was when Thomas, Alito, and the three Trump justices ended the federal constitutional right to abortion two years ago. It also produced a political earthquake, for women and against the GOP, that fall.
Before that, the Republican justices had gutted the Voting Rights Act, unleashed the tsunami of corporate campaign cash–including “dark money”—upheld gerrymandering unless it was obviously racially biased, and turned a blind eye to right-wing intimidation and anti-turnout tactics aimed at voters, poll workers and people who help voters cast ballots.
And the five GOP justices routinely ruled against workers’ rights, too, a point AFL-CIO General Counsel Craig Becker made to a Biden-named Supreme Court “reform” commission three years ago.
The panel’s recommendations were much milder than Biden’s current proposals, and the president filed and forgot them, anyway. The AFL-CIO has yet to formally respond to Biden’s current proposals.
“For decades, the conservative movement has worked tirelessly to seize control of the judiciary,” Becker said then. “Having done so, they use the judiciary as a tool in its efforts to dismantle democracy and impose minority rule on America.
“From gutting the Voting Rights Act to opening the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending on elections, there is no topic on which the Supreme Court has been more consistent than consolidating power for Republican politicians and big corporations.
“As the most effective counterweight to corporate interests, the labor movement is a central target of the right-wing judicial activists who will control the court for decades to come–unless we expand and rebalance the court.”
The situation is so bad, Becker said then, that union lawyers go into the High Court’s chambers knowing they’re automatically going to lose, on strictly ideological grounds.
And it’s going to stay that way unless the way justices are chosen, their terms, and their conflicts of interest are overridden, the progressive groups said. The American Constitution Society was typical:
“One of the pillars of a democracy is a fair, impartial, and legitimate judiciary. This necessitates a judiciary bound by the rule of law, judicial norms, and ethics, and not committed to a partisan agenda. Unfortunately, our highest court does not meet this threshold. The Supreme Court is in a legitimacy crisis, evidenced by plummeting public confidence in the face of the Right’s packing of the court and the resulting devastating, partisan decisions…Stripping away fundamental rights while ignoring decades of judicial precedents, and the corrupt behavior of the justices have shown both structural and non-structural Supreme Court reforms are badly needed.”
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