United States – U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday will recommend major Supreme Court reform that would limit the tenure and impose a code of ethics on the Court’s nine members. However, with a polarized Congress, the proposal stands little chance of success.
Speech at the LBJ Library
He will outline the changes together with a constitutional amendment that will do away with broad immunity for presidents during a speech at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, as reported by Reuters.
“This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice in the Supreme Court of the United States. No one,” Biden said in an op-ed published in the Washington Post on Monday.
Biden’s call for reforms comes hardly a week after Biden pulled out of the presidential election race and offered his support to Harris to challenge Trump in the November polls.
Context of the Reforms
It also comes after the Supreme Court has ruled that there is no Constitutional right to abortion and other rulings that halted Biden’s initiatives on immigration, student loans, vaccine mandates and climate change.’
The justices of the Supreme Court are life-tenured, and despite serving on the federal judiciary, the Supreme Court is not bound by any specific ethics code of conduct. They are bound by disclosure statutes regarding outside earnings and specific gifts, including food and other “personal hospitality,” such as lodging at an individual residence. However, they are excluded from these statutes.
Previous Ethical Concerns
The Court endorsed its first code of conduct in November following the emergence of cases involving Justice Clarence Thomas, who had received undisclosed trips from a donor. This year, accounts of flags related to then-President Trump’s efforts to prematurely overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential elections were also reported, with flags hoisted at Samuel Alito’s homes in Virginia and New Jersey.
The critics argue that this code of conduct is incomplete since it permits justices to independently determine their level of participation in certain cases and lacks mechanisms for removal.
Ethics and Term Limits
According to the White House, Biden will ask Congress to pass binding and enforceable rules which would mean the following regarding justices: they must report gifts; they cannot engage in public political activities; and they will have to step aside from cases where they or their spouses have substantial financial or other interests.
Proposed Term Limits
He will also call on Congress to set an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices, the White House added.
It would take another law to enact term limits and an ethics code in the Supreme Court, but this is not feasible for the currently divided Congress.
Constitutional Amendment for Presidential Accountability
Also, Biden himself plans to introduce the constitutional amendment, which emphasizes that former presidents cannot be provided with federal immunity from any criminal charges, trials, convictions, or sentencing.
Such an amendment would be even more difficult to pass as it requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress or a call for a convention by the legislatures in two-thirds of the states followed by ratification by three-eighths of state legislatures, that is, 38 out of the 50 states, as reported by Reuters.
In July, the U. S. Supreme Court stated that Trump could not be prosecuted for actions that he took legally as the president in a decision that affirmed for the first time the presidential immunity from prosecution.