Proposals to expand the Supreme Court or put term limits on the justices seem all but dead on arrival. Now Biden’s SCOTUS reform effort has another target: the Senate confirmation rules.
Overhauling the Supreme Court may turn out to be too heavy a lift for the high-powered legal panel that President Joe Biden tapped to consider reforms to the structure of the nation’s highest court, but the commission might have a bit more traction tinkering with the court’s beleaguered feeder system: the U.S. Senate.
“I was very pleasantly surprised,” said Jeffrey Peck, who served as a counsel to Biden when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in the late 1980s and is the author ofPeck carried out anonymous interviews with 25 people who’d served as former senior Senate staffers — and even some people who served as senators. He says the group was roughly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. From that he crafted a series of proposals to overhaul the process.
What was released did not sit well with those on the left demanding major changes to the court, such as increases in the number of justices, rotating panels or limits on justices’ terms, which currently run for life. While many casual observers might not have realized it, the commission was never asked to provide explicit recommendations on any of those proposals, but solely to review the arguments for and against them.
“The conversations the Supreme Court Commission has started are an important step towards achieving the reforms we so desperately need — up to and including expanding the Supreme Court,” said Rakim Brooks of the Alliance for Justice, another progressive judicial advocacy group. “The need for reform is substantial. Only democracy can save this court, and the commission’s report will help raise awareness that reform is not only possible, but necessary.
“I think they’re certainly more viable than some of the more structural reforms,” said Peck, the former Senate Judiciary counsel. “There’s a recognition on both sides of the aisle that the current process just does not work.” Many of the proposals also include a delayed implementation to 2025 or later, meaning lawmakers and their staff wouldn’t know whether they or the opposition would be in charge in the Senate or in the White House when they kicked in.
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