Biden prepping to endorse sweeping changes to Supreme Court

there is an entire recent Harvard Law Review issue dedicated to the topic with discussion of how the constitutional question is uncertain. Have a look at it

 

Thomas and others have claimed that millions in gifts were for "personal hospitality", and that’s why he didn’t need to disclose them. It’s clear that this is ethically wrong and underscores the need for reform.

 

I will say that Congress has Article II enforcement authority over the Court with its impeachment ability. That is all the enforceability one could hope for I should think

 

read the Brookings article and you will see that the rules regarding "personal hospitality" changed somewhere around March 2023, and the understanding is that Thomas and the other justices will comply with those newly-amended rules from here on. The rules that Thomas previously argues he was following were those that were in effect when he joined the Court in the early 1990s.

 

on edit: slight chance that was covered in the Harvard Law Review articles, see in particular Chapter Three:

https://harvardlawreview.org/archives/vol-137-no-6/

 

And the Supreme Court should implement a binding code of conduct. If there are concerns about Congress using it as a political tool (which is a valid worry given recent actions by Congress), then the oversight could be handled by other court members. Accountability to one’s peers or close colleagues seems like a reasonable alternative. The argument that ethical standards should be voluntary no longer holds water, especially given the abuse demonstrated by some of the highest court members.

 

I do not believe anyone is making an affirmative argument that ethical standards "should" be voluntary--I take it that Roberts has in the past said the Court's consulting the federal Code of Conduct for judges was voluntary, but I take him to be making a descriptive statement, not a normative one. (Law review article cited above Chap Three footnote 71).

But I understand the point you are trying to make and appreciate it.

 

We have a 6:3 majority. I'm not sure how Watchmen watch the other Watchmen. Can three kick out one of six with impeachable charges? Can six kick out three?

It's funny that we're knee deep in this discussion of monied interests "corrupting justices" when the whole tug of war over the last 30-40 years has been to appoint justices with near unbreakable ideological bents.

Having a lifetime appointees in TX or FL throwing out corruption charges or pump n dump schemes because they wanna or flew a team flag has been The Corruption Process.

It was just a slow boil over time.

 

Washington Post link will work for everyone including @dobro1229

https://wapo.st/3LLfghz

Opinion: Biden’s supreme stunt
The president’s Supreme Court proposals are much more about politics and resentment than reform.
By Jason Willick
July 30, 2024 at 3:10 p.m. EDT

Since Joe Biden was dragged kicking and screaming from the 2024 presidential race, Americans have been treated with many an encomium to the president’s selfless statesmanship. Well, the statesman has struck again, this time with a bitter, partisan “reform” aimed at the Supreme Court. Supposedly concerned for “the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions,” Biden, in a Post op-ed and speech in Texas, has endorsed a trio of vague, dead-on-arrival proposals useful only for undermining a currently more-conservative branch of government and further polarizing the electorate ahead of the 2024 elections.

Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to alter the Supreme Court in 1937 after the justices blocked a major chunk of his New Deal legislative agenda. Biden can make no such complaint about today’s court. Yes, the justices in 2022 overturned their own precedent in Roe v. Wade, returning abortion policy to the states, and in 2023 they shot down Biden’s brazen attempt to seize Congress’s spending power by canceling over $400 billion in student loan debt. But to the extent that this president’s far-reaching legislative agenda has been stymied, Congress, not the court, has been the culprit.

It’s telling that the one Supreme Court decision that the bitter Biden wants a constitutional amendment to reverse is the one that hindered his administration’s ability to prosecute his political rival during the 2024 election season. In Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court held that presidents may not be criminally prosecuted for performing their core constitutional functions and that they have some level of immunity for other “official acts.”

Repeating the incantation that “no one is above the law,” Biden expressed his dislike for the decision and proposed a constitutional amendment to “make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office.” But what does Biden want the amended Constitution to say, exactly? The White House offers few specifics for this or any of his ideas. After all, Biden’s own Justice Department conceded in court proceedings that there could be circumstances — such as when the president orders a military strike abroad — in which courts “would properly recognize some kind of immunity.”

One constitutional amendment on the subject proposed by Democrats in Congress says that former presidents are not immune from prosecution for breaking an “otherwise valid” criminal law “on the sole ground” that their charged conduct was an official act. But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s opinion in Trump v. United States explained that a law that criminalizes the president’s performance of core constitutional duties — such as firing a subordinate — is not valid. Biden’s Justice Department made a historic mistake in trying to prosecute former president Donald Trump for such obviously protected conduct.

As Justice Amy Coney Barrett put it in her concurrence, the court’s idea of “immunity” is partly a “shorthand” for the proposition that former presidents “can challenge the constitutionality of a criminal statute” used against them. On that point, again, the Biden Justice Department partly agreed, telling the Supreme Court that presidents “can assert as-applied Article II objections to criminal laws that interfere with an exclusive power.”

Is it Biden’s intent to reverse his own Justice Department’s position — and to constitutionally strip presidents of any criminal defense when they are prosecuted by the opposing party for a controversial official act such as pardoning an unpopular prisoner? I doubt it, but then again, it hardly matters. Biden and his advisers seem to be picking an issue they know is a political wedge and hoping the public will ignore its complexity as his messaging team repeats rote political slogans. (Have you heard that no one is above the law?)

The second piece of Biden’s proposal, term limits for Supreme Court justices, has at various times attracted bipartisan interest. It wouldn’t necessarily favor one party or another if implemented only prospectively. But Biden leaves the details ambiguous, presumably to please his co-partisans who want to use term limits to knock out long-serving incumbent justices they dislike. By associating term limits with his pique at Donald Trump and the current Supreme Court majority, Biden has polarized perhaps the least-controversial reform idea on the table.

As for a “binding” ethics code (again using congressional proposals as a guide because the White House doesn’t say exactly what it intends), that would mean putting lower-court judges in charge of Supreme Court justices’ decisions whether to recuse themselves from a case, distorting the judicial hierarchy. It might also involve creating a new bureaucratic office to investigate justices in perpetuity.

The balance of power among the branches of government is determined by the effectiveness and trustworthiness of each branch. The irony of this push to tar the judiciary is that it comes from a White House just caught in a grave concealment of information on the president’s infirmity from voters. And the push itself is half-baked: long on clichés, short on specifics that the administration can actually throw its weight behind and defend. Love or hate this Supreme Court, at least it shows its work.

Fundamentally revising the constitutional balance of power, as Biden wants to do, requires more than vacuous endorsements of generic ideas. It requires real statesmanship and savvy — political mastery on the scale of presidents to whom Biden has been grandiosely compared.

The president delivered his address on the Supreme Court at the Lyndon B. Johnson library in Texas. Perhaps he should have instead traveled to the Andrew Johnson library in Tennessee. Another one-term president blocked by his own party from seeking a second term, Johnson also proposed judicial term limits (among other significant structural changes to American government) on his way out the door in 1868.

That Johnson is widely considered one of the country’s worst presidents, but at least he was statesmanlike enough to submit to Congress the text of the constitutional amendments he proposed to pass, so their details could be seriously scrutinized and debated. Biden seems more interested in a last act of pathetic but corrosive ideological grandstanding as he fades, against his will, from the political scene.

Opinion by Jason Willick
Jason Willick is a Washington Post columnist focusing on law, politics and foreign policy. Twitter

​

 

Please explain to me how reform happens without formulation of political opposition leading to a change in political will??

I like how finally in the end this "opinion" columnist uses the word "pathetic" because he just couldn't help but tell on his own ideological bias. The WaPo is totally fine to utilize a Constitutional Scholar to go through this ENDORSEMENT of changes, and walk us through what could or couldn't happen per the text of the law, but they destroy their credibility by throwing their name behind obvious partisan bias pieces of propaganda.

But what does a REAL scholar like Jonathan Turley have to say about it?? The only voice of reason in the law I'll listen to.

 

If the Democrat President of the United States locks up his opponent and two members of the Supreme Court and then deploys the military to keep order and it doesn't result in a dramatic upsurge in libertarianism, that says a lot more negative about the voters in the country than it does about libertarianism.

 

Someone with an extremely limited understanding of ethics would know that this is wrong. Justice Thomas knew it was wrong and he chose to hide it.

A justice in a lower federal court who accepted $4 million in "gifts" would lose their job ... and maybe fined ... and maybe sent to the Big House.

Justice Thomas needs to fired ... needs to pay gift taxes of the $4 million that he has so far acknowledged. The DoJ needs to assign a special prosecutor (oh the irony) to see if Justice Thomas has other gifts that are still not declared ... you know like an offshore bank account.

If Kamala wins, having a special prosecutor deeply and throughly probe Justice Thomas would be a first 100 day task. I could see that Kamala might horse trade with the Congressional Rs here. Drop the Thomas investigation for Thomas's resignation (good old fashion "high tech" lynching) and SCOTUS reform.

 

Not by the Supreme Court justices themselves, as they are too close to each other to act impartially and might have other incentives to act improperly. Of course, this is all speculative, and there could be other solutions. If we want to rely somewhat on precedent, the executive branch has watchdogs that investigate ethical and other issues internally. Similarly, a committee of respected former judges could be established to review and assess the justices. These former judges could be recommended by the Court, with congressional approval.

 

The giver pays gift taxes, not the recipient. There is also a lifetime exemption of over $13 million before it needs to be paid. Some gifts are non-taxable (such as education expenses). So, no matter what, Thomas would not owe taxes on gifts he received. The people who gave him gifts may or may not owe taxes depending on a number of other factors.

 

Do bribes work the same way?

 

have gotten away from posting pieces from the Federalist, but this one pretty much hits the nail on the head. sorry progressive libby leftist types

https://thefederalist.com/2024/07/30/dems-promise-to-save-democracy-by-destroying-the-supreme-court/

Dems Promise To Save ‘Democracy’ By Destroying The Supreme Court
BY: DAVID HARSANYI
JULY 30, 2024

It’s difficult to sit here and make substantive arguments against the Democrats’ Supreme Court “reform” proposal, since everyone knows it’s just a cynical ploy to delegitimize both the court and the Constitution.

Ask yourself this: would any Democrat support the president’s court-packing scheme if they believed Republicans would win both Houses and the presidency? Of course not. It’s Calvinball all the way down.

And it is a court packing scheme. An unconstitutional one. One imagines the term “court packing” hasn’t polled very well with the public, so Biden — or whoever’s running the White House these days — signed off on a backdoor plan. An 18-year term limit for justices would, very conveniently, turn a 6-3 originalist majority into a 6-3 “living and breathing document” majority that would overturn many recent decisions, and rubber stamp a slew of federal abuses.

One might argue it’s all just an election gimmick, since the chances of the reform package passing are close to nil. That’s not the point. The left has normalized the notion that the Supreme Court is both illegitimate and corrupt if it fails to bend to the will of partisans.

After all, none of the left’s objections are grounded in anything resembling a legal argument. The entire case is centered around the specious idea that the court is failing because it does not adhere to the political vision of Democrats. They don’t even pretend to care about neutrality in law, much less the law itself. The contemporary leftist is a consequentialist with no limiting principles.

Speaking of authoritarians. Kamala Harris contends that packing the Supreme Court is necessary because “there is a clear crisis of confidence facing the Supreme Court.”

Is there?

First off, we find ourselves here because of a decades-long attacks on the institution. Democrats have made a mockery of confirmation hearings since the 1980s. After Barack Obama publicly castigated the Supreme Court for upholding the First Amendment, things really took off. Wealthy progressive activist groups began cooking-up pretend scandals and laundering them through faux journalistic operations. The media can now affix with the phrase “plagued by ethic scandals,” or some such nonsense, to every mention of the court.

If there is any crisis of confidence, it’s because the left concocted one.

Even still, as Casey Mattox helpfully points out, Gallup finds that 30 percent of Americans have a “Great Deal/Quite a Lot” of confidence in the Supreme Court. The number has risen slightly in the past two years. Another 31 percent say they have “Some” confidence in SCOTUS.

So, let’s set aside that pesky Article 3 of the Constitution for a moment. If polling is the excuse for stripping the independence of a branch of government, why would we allow Congress, with its 9 percent confidence rating, to do it?

Justices already enforce a code of judicial conduct. There is zero evidence any of them have engaged in unethical behavior on the bench that personally benefited a third party, much less themselves. And there is no evidence justices have deviated from their long-held legal philosophies because they vacationed with a rich friend or any other reason.

It’s also worth remembering that Democrats invented a bunch of new standards to smear Clarence Thomas that they would never follow themselves. Most judicial committee members leading the charge to delegitimize the court have traded in on their position to enrich themselves, including Dick Durbin, Vietnam War fabulist Richard Blumenthal, conspiracy theorist Sheldon Whitehouse, and Peter Welch.

Come to think of it, maybe SCOTUS should be writing ethics rules for Congress.

Democrats want to institute their ethics code to create a system that allows partisans — armed with the newest garbage Politico or ProPublica churns out for its progressive funders— to slander justices in another congressional show trial and bogus investigations.

Sorry, the Supreme Court is an equal branch of government. Chuck Schumer is free to threaten justices, but they still don’t answer to him.

Nor do they answer to Biden, whose family became wealthy peddling a shady influence racket. The presidency, incidentally, has a 26 percent confidence rating with Gallup. The media, deservingly, is near the bottom of the list. Americans, in fact, have more trust in the Supreme Court than they do state-run schools or unions or big business or banks or the criminal justice system.

“What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach,” Biden says.

The only “personal freedom” Democrats are concerned about is legalizing abortion on demand into the ninth month. Just say Dobbs, because I can’t think of a single individual liberty the contemporary left wants to safeguard or enhance.

Though, the president is correct in noting that the court has abnormally upheld the Constitution in recent years. Even then, majority concurrences are quite diverse. And the notion that the textualists walk lock step more than the left is a complete fantasy, as the last session showed.

The president, by the way, has been in government since 1973. Two thirds of the members of the Democrat-controlled Senate are now over 70. The judiciary chair Dick Durbin has been in Congress since 1982.

Anyway, the lifetime appointments for justices are meant to shield the high court from the vagaries and fleeting pressures of political debate. Which is exactly what bothers the left the most: the Supreme Court doing its job. If we knew exactly when confirmation votes were going to take place, rest assured the process would degenerate into an even uglier partisan mess. Which, again, is exactly what the anti-norm leftist desires.

Indeed, the Democrats’ plan to pack the Supreme Court, the last properly functioning institution in D.C., is an attack on constitutional order, and its long-term consequences are far more corrosive than anything that happened on Jan. 6. It’s not even close, really.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of six books—the most recent, The The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

​

 

Hardly given a justice has never been removed in history. It's clearly not an effective tool for removing justices or presidents.

Trump should have been removed. And frankly, Biden should be removed as well. But Congress's only power over the Executive isn't appeachment by a long shot.

The Courts have immense power over Congress, and over the Executive Branch. To rule that the EPA cannot regulate pollution is nuts. They are overturning the entire gov't on the whim of extremist ideology - not what our founding fathers wanted. This court is unchecked and abusing its power. Clearly it needs to be reined in just as the other two branches are.

To understand how bad what this court is doing - just think what happens when the extremists on the court are gone and replaced by moderate - then everything will be undone and the country will have to readjust. That's why precedent matters. That's why it used to be respected. Because you didn't just interpret the Constitution the way you saw it, you took into account all the justices before you. When you throw that out, you're not a judge anymore, you're a politician.

 

Saying it's uncertain is a long way from your argument that it is unconstitutional. Which one are you saying?

 

I side with those who argue it's unconstitutional. Impeachment is the only recourse the Constitution allows. Use it.

 

So all the rules Congress currently has been doing for the last 100 years - including around recusals, pay, etc - are all unconstitutional? Are you saying the Justices should determine their salary, and congress is violating the constitution? Is Congress violating it by determining retirement requirements?

If you are saying the only power is impeachment, what about all the other powers Congress currently has on the SCOTUS?