Committee for Justice president Curt Levey issued the following statement on President Biden’s speech today proposing Supreme Court “reforms.” In 2021, Mr. Levey testified before the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court appointed by Biden to consider possible reforms:
In his speech, President Biden opined that the Supreme Court is a threat to civil rights and is “mired in a crisis of ethics” that has “caused public opinion to question the Court’s fairness and independence.”
If the President were actually concerned with the public’s confidence in the Supreme Court, he would look in the mirror and curb his baseless accusations—motivated by politics and disagreement with some of the justices’ decisions—that the Court is ideologically extreme and that the ethics of the conservatives justices are compromised. And he would urge his allies to do the same.
But instead of commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act by engaging in a serious discussion of the civil rights movement, Biden used the occasion to pander to his progressive base by attacking the Supreme Court and proposing Supreme Court “reforms”—term limits and a Congressionally-imposed code of ethics—that are constitutionally dubious and which he knows have no chance of passage.
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