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President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according to two people briefed on the plans.
He is also weighing whether to call for a constitutional amendment to eliminate broad immunity for presidents and other constitutional officeholders, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
The announcement would mark a major shift for Biden, a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has long resisted calls to reform the high court. The potential changes come in response to growing outrage among his supporters about recent ethics scandals surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas and decisions by the new court majority that have changed legal precedent on issues including abortion and federal regulatory powers.
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When people bitch and moan about leftists not falling in line behind presidents, it’s because we want shit like this to happen. If Biden was polling favorably and had no detractors, I doubt we would see him attempting to tackle something like this.
This is good news though, and marks the first steps on a long journey to establishing a legitimate Supreme Court once more.
Fucking vote.
Are the fascists going to hang up their red hats if Biden wins? Is Biden going to any fucking thing to stop them in his second term? We need to start thinking about what to do about this now.
One problem at a time. The biggest problem first.
Getting people to the voting booth at all costs. Nothing else comes even close to being relevant if Trump wins.
Heck. It might be the last democratic election in American history. Seems worth voting just to say you were there.
Cool, but in the mean time, VOTE. Planning to stop a fascist takeover of government is a lot easier if the fascists don’t control the Presidency.
drag everybody out to vote first of all. Start with the easy steps then start daydreaming about holing up in a bunker with a stockpile of guns, or whatever it is you’re suggesting.
This, 100%. And to pile on, any effort that doesn’t include expanding the size of the Supreme Court to 13 is too little, too late.
It’s like the DNC holding abortion rights over everyone’s heads instead of actually doing something about it for decades.
I float this from time to time: eliminate the fixed size. Open a new vacancy on the court every other year, first and third years of the presidential term. When a justice dies or retires, we remove their seat; it does not create a new vacancy. We just keep adding life-term justices on a slow, fixed schedule. I would expect the court would eventually vary in size from about 17 to 20 justices.
We would need emergency procedures to reconstitute a court if it ever falls below 7; I’d establish a line of succession from the most senior chief judge of the circuit courts, down to the most junior.
I’d also provide a limited means for a president to bypass a hostile, politically-motivated Senate. The chief judges of the circuit courts were previously confirmed by the Senate and are already in the SCOTUS line of succession established above. They are pre-confirmed. They can be elevated to a regular vacancy without additional confirmation. This gives a pool of 13 veto-proof candidates for the president to choose from if the Senate decides to play games.
First I’ve heard of something like this but I like it. Did you come up with this idea on your own or is there a name or resource I can read more about it under?
I highly doubt I’m the first person to think of removing the fixed size of the court, but I haven’t seen a similar approach before or since.
My inspiration was the rampant politicization over Scalia’s seat at the beginning of the 2016 election year, and RBG’s untimely death shortly before the 2020 election. These vacancies from unexpected deaths should not have had the outsized political effects that they did.
I also wanted to target the longstanding practice of strategic resignation. I think it is a form of collusion, conspiracy, and a violation of the separation of powers, with no practical means of prohibition or avoidance. You can’t simply tell a justice they can’t quit the court, even when doing so is obviously motivated by political expediency.
With this approach, a popular president with a strong mandate will have a long-term influence on the court. They will be able to name a fairly young jurist, who will serve and influence for decades. A divisive president who doesn’t have the support of the Senate will only be able to appoint from the most senior candidates on the circuit courts, who aren’t likely to last more than a few years. The more popular the president, the greater their long-term influence on the court.
Bringing back a 2 week old comment but man were you scarily close to what Biden is proposing!
This is a really interesting approach, but do you see no problem with having that many justices? Would you keep the majority rules approach? Wouldn’t this more likely lead to collations within the justices?
I like the idea, but I’m not sure that many justices would make the bench better.
I don’t foresee much of a problem, no. Remember, the court size is going to increase no faster than one justice every two years. The court will slowly phase in those changes they need to make to adapt to its slow embiggination.
I imagine that we will see more recusals and abstentions under this system. Not every justice will choose to hear every case, or render/join an opinion on every case they do hear.
That’s interesting. I wonder if there’s a way to codify it that only n justices can proceed over a single case. That also has the added bonus of allowing the court to hear multiple cases at the same time, reducing the backlog.
Like the justices are picked through lottery or something like that.
It’s kinda wild to me the the supreme court of Canada has the same number of justices as you guys, and we’re a tenth of your size. We have a mandatory 75 retirement age and each region is given a block of justices, 3 for Quebec because they use civil not common law and then the rest are divided kinda sorta by population, convention has 3 from Ontario, 2 for the west (typically 1 BC, 1 for the prairies which rotates) and 1 for the Atlantic. It’s not perfect but we don’t seem to have the same issues as y’all do, during the Harper years for example a lot of the Tory policies got struck down by judges he appointed.
The one that made sense at a minimum for you was to have a justice from each circuit, the court should totally represent each region.
Do you think there is any settled law the Supreme Court wouldn’t have struck down?
These are not legal opinions that have solid reasoning. Just like people trying to get other religions recognized in public schools.
It will not fly because the people you are arguing with would rather your voice be removed from the public debate, whatever means necessary.
You can’t be clever to a fascist and win. Not only that way at least.
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How is he going to get anything through the Republican house or even the Senate without a Democratic super majority?
Proposing the changes could excite the voters enough to give him control of both chambers. Even announcing it might shift the needle for some fence sitters.
That’s exactly what we need right now. There are almost no undecided voters left, just unmotivated voters. We need something to energize voters who have been feeling ignored by the DNC, at best.
Seriously. His passive approach to the upcoming election has thusfar been infuriating. It’s like he’s assumed that not being Trump will be enough to win it for him, while his support dwindles. We need something to get people excited about voting for him, and wide-sweeping governmental reforms could be just that, at least among folks who’re paying attention. The “Well, both sides are corrupt, so what does it matter?” crowd.
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The thing you’re missing is that left-leaning Americans have a hard time believing lip service like this because we’ve seen the Democrats fail to deliver on big promises over and over and over. Or they’ll do some crappy watered-down version of what they promised and use that as an excuse not to do anything else on the issue for decades (health care is in this category, minor changes in the right direction in 2010, and it wasn’t even until 2020 that the Democrats would admit maybe everything wasn’t solved yet).
I’m gonna vote for Biden despite the fact that I do not believe he should be president, but I fully don’t believe a word of this. The Democrats have played this type of card right before every election, and it always ends in disappointment.
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Couldn’t have said it better myself. This is red meat for the base, but that’s what we need right now after weeks of feeling deflated.
This is the most annoying part about politics.
It’d be nice if he’d announce dealing with Citizens United at the same time.
Stop. This is good.
You are looking at a steak dinner and complaining that there’s no ice cream sundae too.
if the got the sundae, they’d complain it didn’t come with a blowie, too
But I like blowies!
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Im a progressive, but it’s down to either 1) fascism or 2) not fascism.
So… yeah…
I’m lactose intolerant you insensitive jerk!
But I like ice cream sundaes
How many times have the DNC lead people to the polls with big promises, then half way, if at all, deliver? Ive been able to vote since Reagan and its been the same thing every election. This is stuff he should have tried to tackle his first or second year. We are 15 seconds to the end of the fourth quarter and hes trying to throw a Hail Mary in the wrong direction
The downvotes on you are infuriating. That’s just people sticking their heads in the sand. Democrats always whip out the carrot right before an election. Then let it rot afterwards.
Still waiting on that student loan debt memo, Biden. I’d really like to know why you couldn’t even try to do anything on your 2020 promise until right before the 2022 midterms.
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I will vote. But you pretending like Biden wasn’t blatantly double-dipping on a campaign promise doesn’t help.
I voted for him in 2020 based on his promises, and all I got was a knife held over me for two years until it was politically expedient for him to bother even trying. He could have already been on a new attempt by the midterms, they had that memo April 2021. They promised to release it. They never did, and it got struck down like we all thought it would.
It’s the same story with every fucking policy. The Democrats waste time twiddling their thumbs until they think they can squeeze more political points out of it, they don’t care about actually doing anything.
This Supreme Court reform is gonna be the same thing. They’re going to milk this through 2024 but never actually do anything, and then sit on it until 2026 before even trying. Meanwhile he could have done this years ago and we could have already moved past whatever BS the Republicans will use to stop it and started on the next plan.
I’m so fucking tired of empty promises.
Biden offers a leftist as much as Republicans offers a Democrat.
It would involve winning the Presidency and both houses of Congress in the next election, and then nuking the Filibuster.
keeping republicans from retaining the house and taking the senate and white house is pretty much mandatory at this point.
The thing he already chose not to do. If it cant be done by Biden unilaterally at this point, it cant be done by him at all.
Manchin and Sinema voted against abolishing the filibuster; Biden was in favor of removing he, he just didn’t have the votes.
And what were the calls to primary the people that would not vote in favor of it in the midterms? That’s how people hold their politicians accountable. But VBNMW people never hold their politicians accountable that’s why the politicians keep getting worse because they don’t have to work in favor of their votes, because they’re going to get them regardless of what they do, no matter how shitty the policy no matter how shitty the rhetoric, the loyalists will stay in line.
Theyve had a shit ton of opportunities to kill the filibuster, but dont want to lose that rotating villain.
So it’s a completely empty promise.
Democrats will never nuke the filibuster. Ever. It’s what lets them pretend their hands are tied when they kill progressive legislation they ran on but never had any intention of ever implementing.
They would rather lose Democracy forever than abandon the relic of Jim Crow they use for its intended purpose.
Well, he’s immune now so clearly he should just assassinate anyone who is in opposition /s
/s, or /s/s?
wink
Even if it doesn’t pass the house or senate, it shows that he’s trying something and isn’t just giving up.
We tried nothing and are all out of ideas
There’s this little event happening in November that can change things.
This is what i’m talking about. Let’s go, Joe.
He is also weighing whether to call for a constitutional amendment to eliminate broad immunity for presidents
“On the one hand, a president shouldn’t be allowed to order Seal Team 6 to kill someone. On the other hand, my neighbor’s dog keeps shitting in my yard.”
How is this a question?
You need 75% of the states to ratify an amendment. Even if Biden wins the election, you think the GOP ruled state legislatures will voluntarily restrict the powers of the next GOP president? The most threatening part of Project 2025 is that it only requires the next Republican President. They’ll bet on Biden not using those powers the Supreme Court invented so that the next Republican President will.
And they’ll win that bet. No Democrat has the guts to use those powers to fight fascism.
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Introduce it, win the presidency, and then force Republicans to ratify it or deal with the threat of a wildly irresponsible President.
They’ll bet on Biden not using those powers the Supreme Court invented
Do republicans ever pass any legislation supported by democrats anymore? What’s the last bill that was passed?
Genocide still enjoys broad bipartisan support.
I think CHIPS
I’m so fucking glad we’ve got a president who can at least handle this moment responsibly. Biden may not be everything people want but he’s not seizing this moment to forward his own personal agenda. I think he is pretty clearly trying to find a more ethical path forward. I don’t think we can say that about all of our past presidents.
If Joe Biden wanted to suddenly find an ethical path, he should start with Gaza.
This proposal is not a sign of newfound morality, it is red meat to his base that are desperate for any signs of life. It’s easy to make promises like this when you never have to fulfill them.
Unfortunately the echo chamber is here in full force. You are 100% right. All these promises are dead in the water with the current house/senate. There is virtually a 0% chance any of these promises get fulfilled.
And you are right about Israel as well. Why he is allowing a genocide to take place with American money and weapons is beyond me.
He’s trying to seize the moment to keep his job, nothing else
Supreme Court reform is necessary, but this is not an election issue. This is the type of thing you fix immediately not use as an election issue. I’m afraid it’s too little too late Joe
If any issue is worth a single issue vote, it’s Supreme Court reform. (Arguably the only possible thing besides this is some form of proportional representation or other election reform, but that’s still not on the table at the moment.)
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Here is a guest link for that article: https://wapo.st/4bGC9gI
The way he’s making sweeping promises gives the impression that he’s confident that he’ll never be in a position to carry them out.
Three and a half years later.
Edit: genuinely curious why the downvotes? The left has been calling for the since day one, back when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. But he’s making it an issue now, when he doesn’t have control of the House, just in time for Trump to possibly win and actually pull it out?
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…for the rabid dogs
Biden LITERALLY CAN DO ANYTHING HE WANTS as long as it’s a Presidential Act! I’m GLAD the Democratic Nominee is SUCH a Fearless Leader!
