Biden Wants to Make Supreme Court Another Political Branch

The U.S. Supreme Court is unique among the three branches, because it’s the only one that’s apolitical.

The justices are appointed by the president rather than elected by the people, and once confirmed by the Senate, they owe no allegiance to any person or party — their only allegiance is to the Constitution.

The president can’t replace them at will like a political appointee; justices can only be replaced when they retire, die or are impeached and removed from office for cause.

And that’s as it should be, because the court is an independent arbiter, one that decides what is and what is not constitutional.

But President Biden wants to change all that. He announced the formation of a commission Friday, to study and advise on the judicial system’s future, including “the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court; the membership and size of the Court; and the Court’s case selection, rules, and practices.”

Of special interest is court-packing by increasing its size, and instituting term limits — determined either by the jurist’s age or his length of service on the bench.

Even the court’s most liberal justices oppose court-packing.

In 2019, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed things were fine just as they were.

"Nine seems to be a good number. It's been that way for a long time," she said, adding, "I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, considered the high court’s most liberal member since the loss of Ginsburg, said in a speech he delivered at Harvard Law School last week that court-packing would lead to public distrust in the judicial system.

He believes that the Supreme Court’s power rests on “the public’s willingness to respect its decisions,” and concluded that expanding it for purely ideological reasons “can only feed that perception” that it’s overly politicized, “further eroding that trust.”

And throughout Biden’s half-century political career, he’s been adamantly opposed court-packing — until this year, as Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, demonstrated in a twitter thread.

In 1983, then-Sen. Biden, D-Del., called President Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme a “bonehead idea” and a “terrible, terrible mistake.”

In 2005, Biden said that FDR was “corrupted by power” by attempting to increase the Supreme Court’s size from nine to 15, calling it a case of "executive overreach.”

Biden confessed that he’d “not been a fan of court-packing” even as recently as October of last year.

So what changed in the last six months? He got elected, and his White House now has ties to a group called Demand Justice. It seeks to expand the Supreme Court despite the convictions of its current members and the president himself.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki was formerly a Demand Justice "communications consultant.” Paige Herwig, Biden’s point person on judicial nominations, served as Demand Justice’s deputy chief counsel.

Demand Justice is part of the network of a reported shadowy, left-wing “dark money” organization called the Sixteen Thirty Fund.

"They want to add seats to the Supreme Court, they want to add term limits for justices, they want to overhaul it and swing not just the Supreme Court but all levels of the judiciary more progressive," Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of conservative-leaning Americans for Public Trust, told Fox News in an interview.

But rather than packing the court by increasing its size, The Washington Post editorial board suggested in an opinion piece published Saturday that Congress should impose term limits on justices.

First impression is that it sounds rich, given that Congress refuses to impose term limits upon itself. But more significantly, it’s arguably unconstitutional.

Although the Constitution doesn’t expressly say judges are appointed for life, Article III, Section 1 states that “The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour …”

And on that subject, Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist No. 78 that “nothing can contribute so much to its firmness and independence as permanency in office.”

Lifetime appointments maintain the integrity of the power granted to judges and justices, assure that their decisions remain free of political consideration, and protect the judiciary from unwarranted interference from the political branches.

Biden may call it “reform,” but it’s actually nothing short of a crass power grab — a bid to control all three branches of government for the foreseeable future. If successful, it would forever tarnish the image of the judiciary and turn judges and justices into political hacks — hacks like Joe Biden.

Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to BizPac Review and Liberty Unyielding. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and an enthusiastic Second Amendment supporter, who can often be found honing his skills at the range. Read Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.