Today is my debut as a bi-weekly columnist for The Hill. Here is the gist of my first column:
Just last week, President Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States released a lengthy set of “discussion materials” that undermined any meaningful attempts at depoliticization, or even balance, for the Court. Statutory expansion beyond the current nine justices – supported by a growing number of Democrats and clearly permissible under the Constitution – was essentially brushed off for its ostensibly “negative effects” on the Court’s “long-term legitimacy” that could “undermine its role in our legal system.” (At least five of the 34 commissioners have publicly disagreed with this supposition.)
Republicans, of course, never had qualms about tinkering with the Supreme Court’s composition, having fashioned an eight-member court during the nearly year-long blockade of Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016. But determining the Court’s size is evidently an exclusively Republican prerogative.
The Commission did allow that term limits might be desirable, although Biden later said that he is opposed to the idea. In any case, that reform would likely require a Constitutional amendment, which would not be fully operative until somewhere between 21 and 46 years after ratification (depending on the details). Under most term limit proposals, a child born tomorrow could grow up, attend college, graduate from law school, and still be sworn into the Supreme Court bar by Justices Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch.
You can read the entire piece here.