Biden Is Right to Take on the Court

In 1983, an ambitious young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department wrote a memo about a hypothetical constitutional amendment to reform the judiciary. “Setting a term of, say, fifteen years would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence,” he wrote. “It would also provide a more regular and greater degree of turnover among the judges.”

That lawyer’s name was John Roberts. He is currently in his 16th year as chief justice of the United States. The past five justices to leave the Supreme Court, whether via death or retirement, each served nearly three decades or longer.

But Roberts’s younger self has found a new and unlikely ally: our nation’s oldest president. Although Joe Biden remains opposed to expanding the number of justices or impeaching them, as some Democrats have called for, the president is reportedly set to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court, most notably term limits and an enforceable code of ethics. Biden cannot make his proposed changes unilaterally. They would need to be passed into law by a majority of the House and 60 senators (or 50 willing to scrap the filibuster), and would face constitutional challenges before the Court itself.