Biden’s election year assault on the Supreme Court

You’ve got to hand it to President Biden — even in his diminished state he still has a few tricks up his sleeve.

You might think that as our octogenarian commander-in-chief is dragged kicking and screaming from office, amid the ignominious fumes of family influence-peddling no less, the last things he would shine a spotlight on are judicial term limits and ethics rules. But in fact his latest attack on the Supreme Court is the next logical battle in a war Biden launched decades ago and which Vice President Harris now plans to fully embrace and run with.

What is being peddled as judicial “reform” is in fact the left’s continued effort to seize the remaining branch of government that has slipped from its grasp. With a working conservative majority for the first time since the 1950s, the Democrats’ mission to control the Court has now become a top priority.

For most of the past century, the Court was dominated by liberal justices eager to legislate from the bench. From abortion to criminal justice to the interpretation of the Commerce Clause, a new generation of progressives managed to elicit rights and bestow powers that appeared nowhere in any sensible reading of the Constitution. From these rulings sprung an expansion of powers that would render today’s federal government unrecognizable from the limited system envisioned by our nation’s Founders.

Rather than counter this trend, nominally conservative Republicans instead contributed to it. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who came to be known as the embodiment of progressive judicial philosophy, was nominated by President Eisenhower. Justice Harry Blackmun, a Nixon nominee, authored the Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade. It was not until President Reagan, advised by Attorney General Ed Meese, that conservatives smartened up and began identifying nominees committed to applying an originalist constitutional framework to their rulings.

And that is when the junior US senator from Delaware saw his opportunity and pounced. From his perch as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden successfully derailed the 1987 nomination of Robert Bork, playing on scare tactics about back-alley abortions and returns to racial segregation. Four years later, Biden honed his “borking” skills on Bush nominee Clarence Thomas whose confirmation he nearly prevented by playing up stale and unsubstantiated harassment claims.

You would think following that one-two punch conservatives would come better prepared for a fight. But when the roles were reversed a Republican-controlled Senate rubber-stamped President Clinton’s two Supreme Court picks (Justices Ginsburg and Breyer), and provided ample support for super-majority confirmations of the two Obama-Biden administration nominees (Justices Sotomayor and Kagan).

Things really started getting nasty under the Trump administration, whose three nominees squeaked by despite near-unanimous Democratic opposition. The Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing was a particular travesty in which Democrats resurrected nonsensical claims from four decades past in an attempt to destroy the nominee. A few years later the Dobbs decision is leaked in an attempt to intimidate Justices from overturning Roe. The Democrats’ latest gambit is circulating baseless accusations about personal relationships and flag flying against Justices Thomas and Alito.

Are we seeing a pattern here?

Don’t let Biden’s good government claims fool you — it is the left’s latest attempt to recapture the only branch of government now outside its reach. The term limit proposal is unconstitutional court-packing in disguise, designed to reshape the Court by immediately bumping Justices Thomas, Roberts and Alito from the bench. A Congressionally-enacted ethics code is a separation of powers violation wherein one branch of government impedes on another. And reversing the Court’s immunity ruling in United States v. Trump would usher in an era of lawfare that would make the current environment pale in comparison.

Biden’s reforms would require at a minimum Congressional action and more likely a constitutional amendment. While neither have any chance of passing today, it is only a matter of time before Democrats control both the White House and Congress and try to ram them through. Republicans shrug off these antics as election year politics at their peril. It would be much wiser to take them seriously and start fighting back.