One of President Joe Biden's final campaign acts before dropping out in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris was to call for a package of Supreme Court reforms, including staggered 18-year term limits for justices and a binding code of ethics that would prohibit the lavish gift-giving and vacation travel handed to multiple justices as exposed in recent scandals.
The Washington Post editorial board is on board with these changes, in a full-throated endorsement published on Friday. Biden's idea, the board wrote, is preferable to the frequently floated plan of court-packing, or adding extra seats to the court to dilute the vote of controversial sitting justices.
"The point is to make the judiciary less of a partisan playground ... one reason Supreme Court nomination battles are so intense is because the stakes are so high. People live a lot longer than they did when the Framers wrote life tenure for judges into the Constitution — to protect the courts against undue influence. Nowadays, a president elected to a single four-year term can influence the judiciary’s course for a generation."
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All of this would be significantly more predictable and less partisan if America knew justices would be termed out at regular intervals, said the board: "it would be rarer for a president to install a disproportionate number. Conversely, winning the presidency more often would — appropriately — mean more appointments for a more popular party over time. Justices would feel less pressure to time their retirements based on partisan control of the presidency or Senate."
What's more, the board said, senators would have less incentive to vote against qualified nominees, in "fear that their choices could doom their legislative agendas for decades."
A binding ethics code could come following reports of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito failed to disclose high-dollar gifts and vacations from billionaire GOP megadonors with interests at the court, as well as Thomas' refusal to recuse from pro-Trump "Stop the Steal" cases his wife was heavily involved in.
All of this would be very difficult to implement, the board wrote, particularly the term limits owing to constitutional protections for judicial life tenure.
"Now that Mr. Biden is no longer a candidate, there is less chance that his proposals can be dismissed as an election-year gambit," they concluded. "Certainly, he should write them as if that’s true; members of the legislative and judicial branches should treat them in the same spirit, too."
