The Supreme Court is becoming a bigger issue in the presidential race between Vice President Harris and former President Trump.
The nation’s highest court is always a contentious issue in presidential contests, given the president’s power to appoint judges. But it is taking on added importance this year as Harris becomes the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to replace President Biden.
Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and support Harris as his successor means the Democratic ticket is almost certain to be led by a Black and Indian American woman. This puts a different spin on debates about the conservative court’s impact on issues like abortion and affirmative action.
Trump appointed three justices to the Supreme Court during his four years in office, and all three were part of the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade. The November confrontation between Trump and Harris, who trumpets the right to abortion in her campaign, will be the first since that decision.
Finally, Biden proposed significant reforms to the court that Harris embraced, providing a new area for debating the court’s role and power in American life that Democrats are eager to have.
“The vast majority of Americans see that something is deeply out of order at the Court,” said Alex Aronson, executive director of the liberal advocacy group Court Accountability.
Biden’s three-pronged proposal would impose 18-year term limits on the nine justices, allow the sitting president to nominate a new justice every two years, and establish a binding code of conduct. It also calls for a constitutional amendment to partially annul the recent high court ruling on presidential immunity.
Reform of the Supreme Court faces great difficulties due to the need for legislative action. To approve a constitutional amendment, two-thirds of the House and Senate must support it, in addition to ratification by three-quarters of the US states.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has already said that legislation promoting “radical” changes would be “dead on arrival” in the House.
Still, Harris’ support for the plan underscores the advantage Democrats see in turning a conservative Supreme Court mired in ethics scandals into a major campaign issue.
The Supreme Court’s approval ratings have plummeted in recent years, reaching an all-time low of 38% last month, according to a Fox News poll conducted after judges granted Trump some criminal immunity for his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.
This represents a drop of 20 points from the high of 58 percent recorded in March 2017 – before the confirmation of three Trump appointees, judges Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
“Harris recognizes that this is a winning issue,” said Dan Urman, a professor of law and politics at Northeastern University.
Harris has expressed openness to changes to the court in the past, in contrast to Biden, who has been more careful on the issue.
In 2019, Harris told Politico that “everything is on the table” to address falling confidence in the Supreme Court, from imposing term limits to adding additional seats to the court.
“We have to face this challenge head on,” she said at the time.
A campaign spokesperson previously told The Hill that Harris does not support court expansion.
Republicans immediately rejected Biden’s proposal to reform the high court as a partisan effort to weaken the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.
Lawmakers called the plan “outrageous”, “no law” It is “dangerous,” while conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo, widely credited with heralding the high court’s conservative supermajority, called the proposal an effort to “delegitimize” the high court.
The Republican National Committee wrote in an email to Harris that she and other Democrats have made the Supreme Court a “target” to issue rulings they disagree with.
“That is arealthreat to democracy,” says the Monday email.
But Harris may be the only one able to deliver the Democrats’ message. While a senator, Harris served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, using her experience as a prosecutor to ask pointed questions of nominees, including Trump’s Supreme Court picks.
Court reform itself did not gain significant traction at the time, but Harris responded with “appropriate political aggressiveness and urgency,” said Aronson, who was legal counsel to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on the committee during Harris’ time. served.
During Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, Harris grilled the nominee on questions ranging from whether he had discussed with anyone special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election to his stance on reproductive issues.
In a viral exchange, Harris investigated whether Kavanaugh could think of any law that would authorize the government to “make decisions about the male body.” Kavanaugh froze before responding that he would answer a “more specific question.”
“Man versus woman,” Harris responded plainly, eliciting a response from Kavanaugh, after some back and forth, that he “wasn’t thinking about anything right now.”
Harris’ efforts to expand reproductive rights make judicial reform a “natural” fit for her presidential campaign, given the high court’s controversial decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Wade two years ago, which still resonates across the country, said New York Times law professor Melissa Murray. University of York, whose research focuses on reproductive rights.
“She has been, perhaps more than anyone else in the administration, steadfast on the issue of reproductive freedom,” Murray said.
The vice president, who has long supported abortion access, has become the White House’s voice on the issue. She traveled the country earlier this year to speak about “reproductive freedoms,” often criticizing Trump for appointing the justices who established a conservative supermajority on the high court that ended up striking down long-standing federal abortion protections.
Placing court reform and reproductive rights side by side could work especially well for young people, who have been “agitating and advocating” for court reform, Murray said.
“They recognize that they were born into a world where they were guaranteed certain rights, and in one fell swoop and with one single opinion, that changed dramatically,” she said.
While the major reforms have not always been popular, experts agree that the basic principles of Biden’s proposal have broad approval. According to Fox polling, 78% of Americans favor limiting Supreme Court justices to an 18-year term.
One more recent YouGov poll found that enforcing a code of ethics is supported by 86% of Democrats and 62% of Republicans, while a limit on how long judges serve in the role was supported by 89% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans.
“These are very modest proposals that the vice president signed on to as part of her campaign,” Murray said.
If Harris wins the election, court reform could be vital to her ability to fulfill other campaign promises.
“If she is serious about the policy priorities she is trying to advance, she cannot pursue that agenda unless she also approaches the Court,” Aronson said.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
