Lame (Duck) Joe’s SCOTUS Deconstruction Scheme

Written by James M. Odom, Senior Counsel

All Americans should be in favor of term limits for the U.S. Supreme Court.

“How long is the term of a Supreme Court Justice?

The Constitution [Article III, Section 1] states that Justices “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” This means that the Justices hold office as long as they choose and can only be removed from office by impeachment.”

The term of a Supreme Court Justice is life, and one life term is enough!

In addition to being the plain meaning of the text, this has been the “long-established legal precedent,” as the White House puts it, for the entire life of the Constitution (237 years, since September 17, 1787).

As Joe Biden’s statements usually are, this attempted reprise to the “switch in time that saved nine,” in addition to being linguistically nonsensical, is also entirely unconstitutional and politically unachievable.

Biden also ultimately proposes that Congress roughly double the size of the Court (even larger than Roosevelt’s proposed increase from 9 to 15). The Constitution does give Congress the authority to determine the number of Justices of the Supreme Court.

For those who have received a more thorough education in U.S. History, you may recognize the “switch in time that saved nine,” as a result of the 1937 Court-packing scheme of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Roosevelt pioneered the idea of Court-packing for the same reason as Biden: dislike of the Court’s politically independent rulings regarding the Constitution.  Despite his own popularity (being elected to 4 terms, and the very reason for the Presidential term limits the White House falsely suggests Congress should duplicate for the Supreme Court), the idea was immensely unpopular and unsuccessful for Roosevelt.

He couldn’t even secure his own party’s votes in the House or the Senate.

In Roosevelt’s case, however, he was eventually able to appoint enough justices during his many terms to get the Court to reverse itself (the switch in time).

From Biden’s actions, we can see what he really believes: “that no one [none of my political opponents] – neither the President nor the Supreme Court—is above the [my] law.”

The design of the Supreme Court (a check upon those who would subvert government for political gain) is precisely why our nation’s Founders provided lifelong terms, to reduce potential political influence.

The sometimes-extreme leftist political bent of several Justices appointed in more recent history (even by conservative Republicans) suggests that this, as with most everything about the Founders’ design of this new form of government, has been pretty effective.

As a result, the Supreme Court has never been able to maintain rulings consistent with any particular political viewpoint over the years.

Many years later, Senator Joe Biden (statistically, everyone will occasionally be correct about something) declared Roosevelt’s Court-packing scheme to be a “bonehead idea.”

Just as when he threatened this in 2021, Biden does not have close to the gravitas, intelligence, or votes in Congress, of Roosevelt, to move this bonehead idea anywhere.

It’s simply a political ploy to get the media propaganda machine onto the current party narrative.

If you ask me, this has no wheels, except to make the Democrat Party look to more Americans like the totalitarian, Marxist party it truly is.