Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said on Monday that there is “zero chance” President Joe Biden can enforce term limits on Supreme Court justices.
Biden is prioritizing the implementation of Supreme Court reform, which includes term limits and an ethics code, as his presidency nears its end, according to a White House fact sheet released on Monday. Jarrett stated on “Fox & Friends” that Biden’s proposed reforms are “unconstitutional” and suggested that the president is advocating for these reforms solely for electoral purposes.
“Like many of Joe Biden’s ideas, most of it is unconstitutional, Steve. And the Democrats cannot simply pass a law imposing term limits on justices because life terms are embedded in the Constitution,” Jarrett told host Steve Doocy. “So, it requires amending the founding document, which is such a high bar, that it has zero chance.”
According to the fact sheet, Biden proposes replacing lifetime appointments with eighteen-year terms for Supreme Court justices to ensure that no single presidency exerts disproportionate influence on the Court. Naturally, the plan comes after former President Donald Trump managed three appointments to the nation’s highest court, which has resulted in upholding the Second Amendment and overturning Roe v. Wade, sending the issue of regulating abortion back to the states where it was before the 1973 ruling changed that.
“Joe’s other idea of imposing ethical controls on justices, as you point out, Steve, that is a blatant violation of the separation of powers principle,” the legal analyst added. “So all of this is just electoral pablum for Democrats.”
Biden, who is already a lame duck, is calling on Congress to pass ethics rules that mandate justices “disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest,” according to the fact sheet.
Biden has also proposed plans to forgive student loan debt during his presidency, despite one of his proposed programs being struck down by the Supreme Court in June 2023.
“I find it interesting that Joe Biden has spent decades opposing the very kind of radical reforms that he now advocates. And it’s also pretty amusing, Steve, an 81-year-old president wants to age out younger high court justices that are a lot more sentient than Joe Biden is. Biden knows he can’t do this,” Jarrett said. “But, like many of the things he proposes, he does it anyway to troll for votes.”
“Remember, most of this has to be done by constitutional amendment. To even propose an amendment, you have to have two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress or states in constitutional conventions and once you get past that hurdle, you got to have ratification by three quarters of the states,” he said. “That is impossible. Sorry.”
