Joe Biden has resisted pressure from his party to attack the Supreme Court head-on for a very long time. He’s getting closer but still isn’t ready to pull the trigger after verdicts this week that upended Democratic priorities.
President Trump has been unusually combative towards the Supreme Court in the wake of Thursday’s judgements that gutted affirmative action in college admissions. According to his comments to the press, the current court is anything but “normal.” At a later time, he commented on MSNBC, saying, “Value system is different.”
Both comments fell short of the fire and fury voiced by certain members of the Democratic Party in response to the affirmative action decision by the Supreme Court. He knocked the ruling, but he didn’t go off on the court like other prominent Democrats did after it ruled against his executive move offering student loan relief.
Biden’s answers did bring him closer to his party’s base, however, and they were well received by some progressive activists who have pushed him to support harsh changes to the court and who will be an essential element of any winning coalition for him in the 2024 presidential election.
Brian Fallon, executive director of the progressive judicial issues group Demand Justice, has been relentlessly pressuring the White House to support a liberal plan to increase members to the Supreme Court. “The most encouraging comment from the president was the unscripted one,” said Fallon. “I suggest incorporating that into the overall message.”
In an interview with MSNBC on Thursday, Biden made it apparent that he still isn’t willing to go where others in his party are by rejecting the idea of packing the court. It will become overly politicised if we begin the process of seeking to extend the court, he warned.
While the court is under increased scrutiny and growing mistrust, the entirety of his answers showed a politician inching closer in rhetoric to the activist camp, at least according to those whom Biden has entrusted with such an endeavour. The president’s group looking into possible changes to the Supreme Court included former U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who noted that Biden’s comments on Thursday were “certainly strong for him.” She also noted that it was not shocking that he did not dismiss the court as illegitimate. It was consistent with his core political persona.
“If the public doesn’t respect the decisions that the court is handing down, we really are all in trouble,” Gertner said, urging Biden to back adding more seats to the court. To put it another way, “He is walking a line that is an appropriate line to walk: ‘I don’t like these decisions. I don’t agree, but I’m not going to try to put the court in a box.
“This is consistent with who he is,” she continued.
The timing of Biden’s measured critique of the Supreme Court is unprecedented. After unexpectedly strong midterm results for Democrats following the overthrow of Roe v. Wade this summer, Vice President Joe Biden plans to make it a core promise of his reelection campaign to codify abortion protections on a national level. Democratic lawmakers’ demands for sweeping changes to the court have been bolstered by recent media coverage of Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas’ connections to notable conservative billionaires.
With the president often playing the role of institutionalist reluctant to challenge the legitimacy of another branch of government within a party increasingly hellbent on getting him to do so, the structure and composition of the court has remained one of several points of contention between Biden and his base.
Since the beginning of his career, when he was an attorney and then served as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Biden has worked hard to dispel the notion that he would ever attempt to undermine the Supreme Court’s autonomy. And although his Democratic primary rivals and party colleagues were sympathetic to or even applauded the idea of extending the Supreme Court, he avoided it throughout his 2020 campaign.
“Action and reaction, anger and more anger, sorrow and frustration at the way things are in this country now politically,” Biden said in a speech in September of 2020, when he was trying to persuade Republicans not to confirm a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the waning weeks of the campaign. To put it another way: “We need to de-escalate, not escalate.”
However, Republican lawmakers ignored the plea. And as they got closer to confirming Amy Coney Barrett, Biden used another middle ground option, pledging to launch the committee of scholars to investigate improvements to the judicial system rather than threatening retaliation.
Democrats see the commission as a typical Washington punt. The report it produced in December 2021 avoided making any significant proposals, such as expanding the number of justices or pushing for term limits. Instead, it supported a code of behaviour for justices and pushed for the continuation of audio streaming of the court’s oral arguments. Even several of the members were frustrated by how fast the report’s limited scope was dismissed in Washington.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Thursday that Biden has “read” the report. She disproved of the claim that “it’s sitting on the shelf and collecting dust.” However, she did not have “any additional steps to move forward on” to share at this time.
The Biden team said no comment was necessary for this article. ProPublica recently reported on Thomas’ tight friendship with a billionaire Republican contributor, and Alito’s vacation with a separate billionaire, but the White House has mostly avoided publicly discussing these issues.
Some progressives, following the initial Dobbs decision, criticised Biden’s response as inadequate. Vice President Biden signed a number of executive orders addressing abortion and reproductive health, but he rejected more leftist ideas including those to establish abortion clinics on federal property.
Biden’s advisors think he did a good job of sounding the alarm, as he criticised the ruling without making the judges look bad and said that the solution lay in legislative action and elections. They believe the policy arena and the polls have validated their position, with Democrats performing far better than expected in the midterm elections thanks in large part to public fury over Dobbs.
