US President Joe Biden has unveiled a long-awaited proposal for changes at the US Supreme Court, calling on Congress to establish term limits and an enforceable ethics code for the court’s nine justices.
He is also pressing legislators to ratify a constitutional amendment limiting presidential immunity.
The White House on Monday detailed the contours of Biden’s court proposal, one that appears to have little chance of being approved by a closely divided Congress with just 99 days to go before election day.
Still, Democrats hope it will help focus voters as they consider their choices in a tight election.
The likely Democratic nominee, vice president Kamala Harris, who has sought to frame her race against Republican ex-President Donald Trump as “a choice between freedom and chaos,” said the court’s fairness had been called into question following recent decisions.
The White House is looking to tap into the growing outrage among Democrats about the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, issuing opinions that overturned landmark decisions on abortion rights and federal regulatory powers that stood for decades.
Liberals also have expressed dismay over revelations about what they say are questionable relationships and decisions by some members of the conservative wing of the court that suggest their impartiality is compromised.
“I have great respect for our institutions and separation of powers,” Mr Biden argues in a Washington Post op-ed published on Monday.
“What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.”
Ms Harris later issued a statement saying the American people must have confidence in a Supreme Court blighted by ethics scandals and decisions overturning long-standing precedent.
She said the reforms being proposed “will help to restore confidence in the Court, strengthen our democracy, and ensure no one is above the law”.
The president planned to speak about his proposal later on Monday during an address at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.
Mr Biden is calling for doing away with lifetime appointments to the court.
He says Congress should pass legislation to establish a system in which the sitting president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in service on the court.
He argues term limits would help ensure that court membership changes with some regularity and adds a measure of predictability to the nomination process.
He also wants Congress to pass legislation establishing a court code of ethics 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.
Biden also is calling on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment reversing the Supreme Court’s recent landmark immunity ruling that determined former presidents have broad immunity from prosecution.
That decision extended the delay in the Washington criminal case against Trump on charges he plotted to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss and all but ended prospects the former president could be tried before the November election.
Democrats say the Biden effort will help put a bright spotlight on recent high court decisions, including the 2022 ruling stripping away women’s constitutional protections for abortion, by the conservative-majority court that includes three justices appointed by Trump.
The announcement marks a remarkable evolution for Biden, who as a candidate had been wary of calls to reform the high court.
But over the course of his presidency, he has become increasingly vocal about his belief that the court has abandoned mainstream constitutional interpretation.
Last week, he announced during an Oval Office speech that he would pursue Supreme Court reform during his final months in office, calling it “critical to our democracy”.
