President Joe Biden has proposed reforming a U.S. Supreme Court whose integrity has been tarnished, if not ruined, by its most conservative members.
The president embraced term limits and a binding ethics code for the justices. Most importantly, he called on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to reverse the court’s mind-boggling decision giving presidents broad immunity from prosecution. “What is happening now is not normal,” Biden wrote in an op-ed published by the Washington Post last Monday, “and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms.
We now stand in a breach.” The conservative justices’ greed, conflicts of interest, dishonesty and deeply un-American interpretation of presidential power have led us to this moment. Not coincidentally, public confidence in the court has plummeted.
Its approval rating is close to a record low, and its disapproval rating is near an all-time high. “We are in an antidemocratic doom loop,” said Mike Sacks, a senior adviser at Court Accountability, a new left-leaning nonprofit whose mission is to “curb judicial corruption and abuse of power.” It’s easy to see why esteem for the court has hit bottom.
Last year, ProPublica and other news outlets reported that Justice Clarence Thomas secretly accepted millions of dollars in gifts and luxury travel from rich, conservative benefactors with business before the court. As we know from her texts to then.