US President Joe Biden is seriously considering publicly endorsing major reforms at the Supreme Court, multiple news outlets reported on Tuesday, including CNN, which cited two sources familiar with the deliberations.
Chief among the changes Biden is planning to publicly back are term limits for the nine justices, who currently serve lifetime appointments.
The President is also said to be preparing to throw his support behind an ethics code for the court that would contain an enforcement mechanism, which was notably absent from the code the court adopted last year, according to CNN.
Additionally, the report said, Biden is considering whether he should push for a constitutional amendment that would effectively reverse the historic ruling from the court earlier this month that gave presidents immunity for some actions they take while in office.
If adopted by Congress, the changes would represent some of the biggest to the court in decades. Progressives have in recent years been pushing for such dramatic reforms at the court, but Biden has not fully embraced their proposed reforms and has taken a much more cautious approach to the court that has included him forming a commission to look at potential reforms during the early days of his presidency.
The reforms backed by Biden would need congressional approval and the constitutional amendment would require ratification by 38 states, a process that CNN noted seems nearly impossible to succeed.
Biden was particularly critical of the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity, which ruled that presidents have an absolute immunity from prosecution for core official acts, calling it "a dark day in America."
“(With) today’s Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity, that fundamentally changed. For all practical purposes, there are virtually no limits on what the president can do. It’s a fundamentally new principle and it’s a dangerous precedent because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law even including the supreme court of the United States,” he said in a speech from the White House at the time.
The President warned that the limits of the president’s power now solely rest with the choices made by the holder of the office. He added that Trump would be a danger in that role.