Op-ed: Rep. Jim Jordan: The Biden-Harris Supreme Court power grab

President Joe Biden's Supreme Court proposal is a blatant power grab. Here's why.

The last time that a president from the Democratic Party proposed radical, sweeping changes to the Supreme Court of the United States, the Democratic-led Senate wrote the plan should be “so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” 

That was 1937. And the Democratic Party of 2024 — to borrow President Joe Biden’s refrain — is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party.

Last week, President Biden proposed a modern rehashing of Franklin Roosevelt’s infamous court packing scheme. Vice President Kamala Harris, as she has done with so many Biden follies, promptly embraced the policy as her own. 

Clothed in the mantle of amorphous “ethics reform,” the Biden-Harris court packing proposal would fundamentally transform the Supreme Court from an independent and neutral arbiter of the Constitution into another arm of the Democrat-bureaucrat machine. 

It’s a power grab, plain and simple.

Like its 1930s predecessor, the Biden-Harris court packing proposal would increase the size of the Supreme Court. But instead of simply adding more seats to the Court, the Biden-Harris plan would force justices to assume “senior status” after 18 years of service. The president would then nominate new justices to the resulting vacancies. 

Why 18 years? Who knows. But it just so happens that the three justices currently with over 18 years of service on the Court were all appointed by Republican presidents: Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Justice Samuel Alito. Justices Thomas and Alito, in particular, have been the favorite targets of recent Democrat-led smears.

The Biden-Harris plan would also force upon the Supreme Court a code of ethics drafted by Congress and approved by the president. Not only does this idea ignore the Court’s existing code of ethics, but it destroys the fundamental separation of powers that has been integral to the Court’s independence for over 230 years.

​The Biden-Harris court packing plan is plainly unconstitutional. Every high school civics student knows that the hallmark of the federal judiciary is the life tenure of judges, which serves to insulate the courts from the political branches of government. The Biden-Harris proposal would topple centuries of American judicial independence and make Supreme Court justices more susceptible to political intimidation.

​Even worse, the creation of a panel of lower-court judges to adjudicate ethical complaints against Supreme Court justices — as a proposal from Senate Democrats envisions — would incentivize frivolous complaints meant to sway the justices. For proof, look no further than the deluge of complaints filed against Judge Aileen Cannon for not rubber-stamping the Biden-Harris administration’s politicized prosecution of President Donald Trump.

​These measures aren’t “ethics” reforms — they’re tools of political coercion.

Contrary to the hyperbole coming from the White House, there is no lapse of ethics at the Supreme Court that demands such drastic and unprecedented changes to the nation’s highest court. It is all instead a crisis manufactured by Democrats to advance their political goals.

Notice how Democrats ignore the fact that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Democrat appointee, refused to recuse herself from a case about President Trump’s tax returns even after she criticized him for not releasing them. Or how Justice Ginsburg donated a signed copy of a Court opinion to raise money for a liberal political action committee. 

Democrats also mislead about the Court’s supposed “partisanship,” failing to mention that Court opinions are routinely unanimous and that decisions often split across traditional ideological lines.

​Democrats conveniently omit these facts because the truth doesn’t match with their cultivated narrative. In lieu of the facts, Democrats resort to misrepresentations, distortions, and outright slander about the conduct of certain conservative justices.

It’s also revealing how the Democrats’ position on court packing has changed as political pressure has mounted from left-wing activists to “fix the court.” In 1983, President Biden called Roosevelt’s court packing proposal a “bone headed” idea and as recently as 2019 he warned that adding justices would erode the Supreme Court’s credibility.

Most hypocritically, both President Biden and Vice President Harris justify extreme changes to the Supreme Court as necessary to “preserve” and “strengthen” our “democracy.” Nothing says protecting democracy like radically restructuring a fundamental and functioning institution of our government to achieve narrow partisan ends.

The motivation behind the Biden-Harris court packing plan boils down to this: Biden, Harris, and other prominent Democrats are upset that the Supreme Court is doing its job upholding the Constitution. They oppose the Court’s recent decisions reining in the unaccountable administrative state and returning power to the elected branches of government. And they fear that their future far-left agenda will not survive independent judicial scrutiny.

In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt sought to pack the court because it would not rubber-stamp his left-wing political agenda. Today, President Biden and Vice President Harris are trying again for largely the same reasons. As it was almost ninety years ago, the modern court packing proposal should be “so emphatically rejected” by all Americans that it never surfaces again.

Rep. Jim Jordan represents Ohio’s 4th District in Congress.