President also says presidential immunity for crimes should be removed and ethics rules for justices should be stricter
Joe Biden has called for a series of reforms to the US Supreme Court, including the introduction of term limits for justices and a constitutional amendment to remove immunity for crimes committed by a president while in office.
In an op-ed published on Monday morning, the president said justices should be limited to a maximum of 18 years’ service on the court rather than the current lifetime appointment, and also said ethics rules should be strengthened to regulate justices’ behavior.
The call for reform comes after the supreme court ruled in early July that former presidents have some degree of immunity from prosecution, a decision that served as a major victory for Donald Trump amid his legal travails.
“This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States,” Biden wrote.
The US Senate only has 100 members (2 per state), and since the body is so small they pride themselves on not limiting debates there. But at some point they do need to decide to progress to a vote, and to do that someone makes a “cloture” motion to close debate on that issue and proceed to a vote. In the US Senate, a cloture motion needs 60 votes to pass.
What this means is that if a minority wants to kill a bill, all they need to do is maintain 41 votes against ending debate. It can never proceed to a vote, then, even if more than 50 Senators are in favor. This is what we call a fillibuster: when enough Senators prevent a measure from being voted on.
This filibuster is just a Senate rule, though, and can be removed by a simple majority vote of the Senate. In the current Democratic majority, though, there were just enough Senators who didn’t want to nuke the rule to keep it in place. They are leaving, though, so if Democrats retain the Senate they will probably have the votes to change the rule.
The drawback is that someday, Republicans will take back the Senate, and if there is no filibuster Democrats in the Minority will have lost a key tool to gum up a Republican majority. But the SC is more important than all that. We need to reform the court ASAP, no matter the political cost.
Quick, name the last time Democrats with a Senate minority actually used the filibuster to block the Republican agenda. Whereas Republicans only have to threaten to filibuster (and not actually stand there talking for days on end) to block the Democratic agenda.
I mean, it didn’t succeed, but they tried: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gorsuch_Supreme_Court_nomination#Filibuster
They tried when they didn’t have control of the Senate, but didn’t end the filibuster when they did have control… weird.
I have absolutely no experience or stakes in this, but from my outside perspective, I doubt a Republican majority would keep the filibuster themselves once it’s an advantage to the Democrats. That trust to not abuse it and have it not be abused against you has been completely eroded in the past years.
That’s putting it mildly. I’d say “obliterated”.