Biden’s supreme stunt

The president’s Supreme Court proposals are much more about politics and resentment than reform.

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.”

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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........

© Washington Post

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