Warning of ‘extreme’ agenda, Biden calls for Supreme court overhaul

AUSTIN, Texas — President Joe Biden, warning that the country’s courts were being weaponized as part of an “extreme and unchecked” conservative agenda, said Monday that he would push for legislation that would bring major changes to the Supreme Court, including term limits and an enforceable code of ethics on the justices.

Biden detailed his plans in a speech at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, his first public engagement since announcing his decision to end his presidential campaign last week.

His visit was initially scheduled to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. But it quickly became a venue for Biden to begin buttoning up a 51-year legislative legacy while outlining an election-year intention to try to stop what many in his party feel is the Supreme Court’s ideological drift into conservatism.

The proposal would require congressional approval and has little hope of gaining traction in a Republican-controlled House and a divided Senate. In a social media post, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., called the plan “dead on arrival” in the House. (Biden later said onstage that Johnson’s “thinking is dead on arrival.”)

This month, the court issued a 6-3 ruling that grants broad immunity to presidents from prosecution for actions they take while in office. Biden called for a constitutional amendment that would limit such immunity.

“For all practical purposes, the court’s decision almost certainly means that the president can violate the oath, flout our laws and face no consequences,” Biden said. “Folks, just imagine what a president could do trampling civil rights and liberties, given such immunity.”

Biden, warning that “extremism is undermining the public confidence in the court’s decisions,” said conservative plans for sweeping policy changes if former President Donald Trump wins a second term, known as Project 2025, would continue to push the courts to the right.

“They’re serious, man,” Biden said. “They’re planning another onslaught attacking civil rights in America.”

His remarks were met with support from others in his party, including Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who said she was a partner in the effort and would take up Biden’s proposal in her campaign.

“These popular reforms will help to restore confidence in the court, strengthen our democracy and ensure no one is above the law,” she said in a statement sent by her campaign.

Conservative activist Leonard A. Leo, known for making the appointments of conservative judges a core of the Republican Party’s agenda, assailed Biden’s efforts as partisan: “It’s about Democrats destroying a court they don’t agree with,” he said in a statement.

Biden and his advisers argue that Americans are broadly concerned about the inner workings of a court that has swung to the right in the years since Biden took office. Recent polls show that the Supreme Court’s approval rating is at a historic low and that a majority of Americans believe that the court’s decisions are driven by ideology.

Over the past two years, Justice Clarence Thomas has become embroiled in ethical scandals for failing to disclose gifts and luxury trips bestowed by a billionaire benefactor. Justice Samuel Alito has faced scrutiny about why flags associated with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol flew outside his homes.

In his remarks Monday, Biden said a system of lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court gave a president undue influence for decades, and he endorsed 18-year term limits for the justices. He said he supported a code of conduct that would require justices to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest, calling them “common-sense reforms that a vast majority of Americans support.”

The amendment he proposed curbing the court’s immunity ruling would state that the Constitution does not confer to former presidents any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction or sentencing, a fact sheet released by the White House said. But a constitutional amendment limiting that decision would be difficult to enact, requiring two-thirds votes in Congress or at a convention called for by two-thirds of the states, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures.

Even if Congress had the will to pass the sort of legislation Biden is proposing, it would raise significant legal questions, said Richard W. Garnett, who teaches constitutional law at Notre Dame.

“We don’t really have completely clear rules about the extent to which Congress is able to regulate the internal practices of the court,” Garnett said. “The things about retirement ages and term limits are complicated by the Constitution’s text. I think things like disclosure rules might be in a different category.”

Trump denounced Biden’s ideas on social media this month, accusing him and Democrats of “desperately trying to ‘Play the Ref’ by calling for an illegal and unConstitutional attack on our SACRED United States Supreme Court.”

Biden has been discussing the proposals with constitutional scholars in recent months, and he had been inching toward announcing them when he ended his campaign. Progressives have urged him to move to limit the power of justices and have called for expanding the number of justices to balance the court’s conservative supermajority, but Biden has opposed those changes.

A commission that Biden created in 2021 to examine the issues did not make specific recommendations, and he did not take any action. Since then, the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, blocked gun-control measures and rejected affirmative action in college admissions.

Adding to the historic significance was Biden’s choice of venue, as Johnson was the last Democratic president to announce during an election year that he would not seek reelection. Jeffrey Berry, a professor of political science at Tufts University, said the similarities ended there.

“Johnson was driven out by a poor performance in the primaries,” Berry said, calling that situation fundamentally different from what happened with Biden, who he said “was pushed out by a party that didn’t want him, and that is rare.”

The appearance was another opportunity to endorse Harris, whose campaign has raised more than $200 million and garnered widespread support from the Democratic Party in a week.

Perhaps the biggest change, so far, is how quickly Harris has surged into the spotlight and how willingly Biden has seemed to step back. He has little planned on his public schedule aside from a trip to Houston on Monday evening to pay respects to Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who died last week. On the tarmac in Austin, Biden was greeted by Rep. Lloyd Doggett, the first Democratic congressman to call on him to end his campaign.

Mark K. Updegrove, president of the LBJ Foundation, praised Biden for his decision to pick Harris as vice president and said his legacy as president was already clear: The president, Updegrove said, “has made the central cause of his presidency the preservation and strengthening of democracy.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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