LISTEN: Judge breaks down Biden’s Supreme Court proposals

SALT LAKE CITY — President Joe Biden has taken a step toward major Supreme Court reform. 

He announced these reforms in an op-ed published by The Washington Post. He also made his reform intentions clear in an official White House release. 

Listen to the Inside Sources discussion on Supreme Court reform. 👇

The proposal focuses on three major reforms: 

1. Instating a “No One is Above the Law” amendment. That amendment would state that the Constitution doesn’t provide immunity from federal crimes due to current or future presidential status. 
2. Setting term limits for Supreme Court justices. Biden proposes a limit of 18 years. 
3. Creating an enforceable code of conduct for the judiciary. 

President Biden reasoned that “recent ethics scandals involving some justices” made these reforms necessary.  

“Recent ethics scandals involving some justices have caused the public to question the fairness and independence that are essential for the Court to faithfully carry out its mission to deliver justice for all Americans,” he said in the White House release. 

Judge Thomas Griffith, who served as a U.S. Circuit Judge for the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C.  joined Boyd Matheson’s Inside Sources Tuesday afternoon to discuss this move. 

Griffith was previously a member of Biden’s commission on the Supreme Court. That commission convened shortly after he took office in 2020. 

Here is part of their conversation, edited for brevity. 

GRIFFITH: “I’m reluctant to call them reforms, because the word reform to me means there’s a problem that needs to be addressed and I’m just not persuaded that there are problems here. I’m distrustful of any recommendations that change the nature [of how] the judiciary does its business. 

The President said so in his op-ed, they come out of dissatisfaction with the decisions of the Supreme Court. I worry about structural changes that are made to the judiciary in response to decisions that are made that people are dissatisfied with. 

I think that’s a real threat to the independence of the judiciary … It’s a fragile protection we have.

MATHESON: Walk us through.

GRIFFITH: If you and I were sitting in Independence Hall in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 and were creating the Constitution and the Supreme Court … There might be a pretty good argument that there ought to be an age limit on service in the judiciary, maybe even a term limit. I’m not necessarily opposed to those ideas. But that’s not going on here. This is dissatisfaction with the Roberts Court. 

I heard this a lot when I was on President Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court. A lot of my fellow commissioners who were dissatisfied with the Roberts Court described their dissatisfaction [by saying] they thought the court was illegitimate … that it was acting unlawfully. 

I don’t agree with that at all.  These are tough issues, they’re wrestling with legal issues, and they may come out with outcomes that you disagree with their reading of the law. 

The problem with these sorts of proposals is they assume [partisanship] is what’s going on. 

Justice Breyer has a great phrase for it … justices are not partisans who vote… and that’s my experience [in the circuit court].