The commission appointed by President Joe Biden to study potential reforms to the Supreme Court did not take a stance on court-packing in the report it submitted to the president this week, but it did suggest support for placing term limits on the individual justices.
The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court voted unanimously to send its report to Biden. The 288-page report did not offer specific recommendations, but instead offered a summary of arguments for and against reforms, including court-packing, which would allow Democrats to add additional leftist judges to the bench.
“No serious person, in either major political party, suggests court-packing as a means of overturning disliked Supreme Court decisions, whether the decision in question is Roe v. Wade or Citizens United,” the report states. “Scholars could say, until very recently, that even as compared to other court reform efforts, ‘court-packing’ is especially out of bounds. This is part of the convention of judicial independence.”
The commission noted it was not taking a “position on the validity or strength of these claims,” in large part because its own members were so divided on the issue.
“Mirroring the broader public debate, there is profound disagreement among commissioners on these issues,” the report states. “We present the arguments in order to fulfill our charge to provide a complete account of the contemporary court reform debate.”
The commission seemed to be more receptive to term limits for justices.
“Proponents of term limits argue that they would help ensure that the Court’s membership is broadly responsive to the outcome of elections over time,” the reports states, “make appointments to the Court more predictable and less arbitrary; reduce the chances that excess power might be concentrated in any single Justice for extended periods of time; and enhance the Court’s decisionmaking by ensuring regular rotation in decisionmakers, while maintaining judicial independence by guaranteeing long terms and lifetime salaries.”
