President Joe Biden’s panel to study whether the Democrats should add Supreme Court justices—known as court-packing—remained unwilling to form a decisive conclusion in their newly released report but appeared largely reluctant to endorse the idea, according to the Epoch Times. .
I previously wrote that the Supreme Court commission seemed designed to kill the court packing plan. It now appears to have done so. https://t.co/MZEzH8ajJx Death by commission is a long-standing tactic in Washington … in the absence of leadership.https://t.co/rVF26OYlst
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) October 15, 2021
“While some commissioners agree, at least in part, with critics who want the court expanded, others conclude that ‘Court expansion is likely to undermine, rather than enhance, the Supreme Court’s legitimacy and its role in the constitutional system, and there are significant reasons to be skeptical that expansion would serve democratic values,’” the commission said.
However, they appeared to be warmer on the idea of eliminating the lifetime appointment of justices following former President Donald Trump’s success in confirming three new justices to replace a conservative, a moderate and a liberal on the court.
Leftists complain that it is too conservative now, although there is no evidence to support those assertions.
Court-packing activists have used as pretense to cry injustice the fact that a Republican-led Senate refused to consider then-President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, a firebrand leftist who has since been confirmed as attorney general under the Biden administration.
But so far, the scheme seems dead-on-arrival.
The panel seemed more intent on limiting Supreme Court justices’ tenure to 18 years instead of the lifetime appointments they enjoy now, said USA Today.
Term limits would “advance our Constitution’s commitment to checks and balances and popular sovereignty” said the panel.
Democrats are especially upset that the late, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a liberal court member, did not resign under Obama, allowing the far-left president to appoint a progressive successor before she died in office under Trump.
Currently, liberals are putting pressure on the oldest remaining Supreme Court judge, Justice Stephen Breyer, 82, to retire so that Biden can appoint a successor while Democrats still enjoy a razor-thin edge in the Senate.
Others worry that without lifetime appointments Supreme Court justices would be beholden to special interests, looking for opportunities after retirement.
“[Lifetime appointment] was put into the Constitution to preserve the total independence of the judiciary,” said Michael Meltsner, a law professor at Northeastern University, in a recent analysis. “Once a justice is confirmed and takes a seat on the court, they’re not beholden to anybody.”
It’s still not certain the Congress has the authority to enact term-limits on Supreme Court justices.
“Unsettled is whether Congress could limit justices’ tenure on the Supreme Court as long as it preserves their tenure as judges by reassigning them to other federal courts,” said the far-left Brookings Institute.
The move is one of several ways that leftists pushing a radical social-engineering agenda have sought to re-imagine the Constitution as mere suggestions rather than the law of the land.
Biden has undertaken several times to disregard the law—refusing to enforce immigration rules at the nation’s southern border, and even ignoring a Supreme Court decision that required him ti discontinue an unconstitutional eviction moratorium that had been put in place during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
His controversial vaccine mandates threaten to run afoul of both the Constitution and the post-World-War-II Nuremberg Code.
The current administration also has continued to whittle away at the edges of many other freedoms long taken for granted by Americans as having been God-given, including:
- First Amendment free speech rights by encouraging Big Tech censorship and limiting the ability to assemble in the nation’s capital
- Second Amendment gun rights
- Fourth Amendment privacy rights by snooping on Americans’ personal bank accounts and asking Google to supply information on keyword searches
- Fifth Amendment due process rights for the political dissidents involved in the US Capitol uprising.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
