President Joe Biden is a patient man, with an abiding respect, bordering on reverence, for American political institutions.

For the first three-and-a-half years of his presidency, Biden cautiously avoided confronting the Supreme Court. Only recently has he come forward strongly in support of court reform, including a proposal for Supreme Court term limits.

It is an excellent idea, but it doesn’t go far enough.

Even as the court’s right-wing super-majority, with scant concern for its own precedents, ran roughshod over voting rights, gun control, reproductive rights and regulatory protection of the environment, Biden refrained from embracing reforms, essentially shelving the report of his own presidential commission on court reform.

On the last day of the just-concluded term, however, the six conservative justices delivered an opinion declaring former presidents, and specifically former President Donald Trump, almost totally immune from prosecution for criminal acts committed while in office.

That decision, which was ungrounded in the Constitution’s text and staggering in its implications, spurred Biden to action. In addition to term limits, Biden’s proposals include a constitutional amendment eliminating presidential immunity, and a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court.

As others have........

© The Hill