President Joe Biden plans to sign an executive order to create a commission that would research and study potential reforms that could be implemented to the current Supreme Court system. The commission will research and advise Biden on several possible reforms such as setting term limits for Supreme Court justices or increasing the number of justices, an idea commonly referred to as ‘court-packing.’
Biden’s executive order will create “the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, comprised of a bipartisan group of experts on the Court and the Court reform debate,” a statement from the White House released on Friday read.
The commission will include “advocates for the reform of democratic institutions and of the administration of justice” and former federal judges and lawyers that have previously argued before the Supreme Court.
“The expertise represented on the Commission includes constitutional law, history, and political science,” the White House stated.
The panel will be led by Bob Bauer, former counsel to former President Barack Obama, and Cristina Rodriguez, former deputy assistant attorney general under the Obama administration.
Bauer has been a vocal advocate for imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices and wrote a piece for the Washington Post in 2005 stating, “in our system of government, we normally constrain great power with limits rather than license its indefinite exercise.”
Additionally, Bauer worked for the Perkins Coie law firm, which was involved in the widely discredited Trump-Russia ‘dossier.’ According to Perkins Coie, Bauer left the law firm in 2019.
While on the campaign trail, then-candidate Biden refused to speak about his stance on ‘court-packing,’ a current goal of progressive democrats. Instead, Biden proposed the presidential commission to study potential Supreme Court reforms as an alternative to ‘court-packing.’
In Fall of 2019, Biden told a reporter, “It’s not about court-packing, There’s a number of other things that our constitutional scholars have debated. The last thing we need to do is turn the Supreme Court into just a political football, whoever has the most votes gets whatever they want. Presidents come and go. Supreme Court justices stay for generations.”
