Progressives responded to this week’s
sweeping Supreme Court decisions with a clear message: It is time to reshape the high court.
But
Joe Biden isn’t convinced.
The president, a staunch institutionalist, has largely rejected calls from liberals to push for term limits for justices and for expanding the size of the court, warning that doing so could further politicize the judiciary.
Public confidence in the Supreme Court has declined, driven in large part by the unpopularity of its ruling last year
overturning a constitutional right to abortion. Some
31% of voters held a positive view of the high court in an NBC News poll released this week, a record low since the poll first asked about the court in 1992 and significantly below the 50% with a positive view in 2018. Some 40% in the new survey had a negative view of the court.
Some polls have found support for term limits for Supreme Court justices, but opinion on adding additional justices to the court has been divided. About two-thirds of Americans favored term limits or a mandatory retirement age for the justices in an Associated Press-NORC poll last July, taken just weeks after the high court’s ruling on abortion.
But Biden hasn’t budged in his reluctance to support changes at the court.
In
an interview this week with MSNBC, Biden said the nation’s high court had done “more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions” than any Supreme Court in recent history. But he added, “If we start the process of trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it, maybe forever, in a way that is not healthy.”
The president has largely rejected calls from liberals to push for term limits and expansion, warning that doing so could further politicize the judiciary.
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