The infamous 920-page Project 2025, which provides a blueprint for a radical right-wing agenda under a second Donald Trump presidency, doesn’t recommend any reforms to the Supreme Court — and for good reason. The conservative extremists who seek to install Trump have already taken over the high court. But the reforms President Joe Biden advocates — and Kamala Harris endorses — could go a long way toward diluting the court’s unrestrained power. This also highlights the Supreme Court as a critical voting issue in the presidential election.

Trump and his supporters know that to secure and maintain power, a strongman must control the courts. During his presidential tenure, Trump solidified the radical conservative majority on the Supreme Court by appointing three right-wingers to solidify a six-person supermajority. He also installed 231 federal district court and appeals court judges. They are all serving life terms.

Biden’s suggested reforms would create term limits for members of the Supreme Court and establish a binding code of judicial ethics for them. A third Biden proposal would forbid immunity for a former president who committed crimes while in office.

On July 29, the White House issued a release that said, “Term limits would help ensure that the Court’s membership changes with some regularity; make timing for Court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary; and reduce the chance that any single Presidency imposes undue influence for generations to come.” Under Biden’s proposal, the president would appoint a member to the Supreme Court every two years, and that member would spend 18 years in active service on the high court.

In an op-ed published the following day in The New York Times, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a vehement critic of the right-wing Supreme Court, argued that Biden’s suggested term limit “makes enormous sense” but has “little chance of being enacted.” Chemerinsky notes that several members currently on the court may well serve more than 30 years, adding, “That is too much power for too long in one person’s hands.” But........

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