Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, reacts to President Biden's proposal to reform the United States Supreme Court:
"Politics has always been part of debates over Supreme Court nominations and machinations and Biden's 'reform' proposal is no exception. Term limits are popular—that they'd increase public confidence in the Court is the strongest argument for them—but they wouldn't change how the Court operates and there's no lawful way to do them without a constitutional amendment. Ethics reform sounds good, but in this context it's a solution in search of a problem and the justices earlier this year unanimously promulgated a new ethics code anyway. And the Court's presidential-immunity decision wasn't so broad or groundbreaking to justify either Trump supporters' crowing or his opponents' wailing—and certainly doesn't merit a constitutional amendment to change. In short, this is a case where a weakened president has been pushed by left-wing activists to propose radical changes to an institution that still enjoys more public confidence than any other at the federal level save the military. Each time Democrats have broken norms in this area in the last two decades—from blanket filibusters of judicial nominations under Bush, to removing the lower-court filibuster under Obama, to forcing Mitch McConnell to end Supreme Court filibusters under Trump—it was unwise and redounded to their detriment. This will be no different."
For more insight into Supreme Court politics, explore Ilya Shapiro's 2020 book, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court, with a paperback edition updated through the 2022 confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Please direct any media inquiries to press officer Grace Twehous at gtwehous@manhattan.institute.
Photo by DREW ANGERER/AFP via Getty Images