President Biden appointed a special study commission – heavily loaded with left-wing figures – not to improve the Supreme Court but to change its decisions.
That’s according to Thomas Jipping, the deputy director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
He wrote at the Daily Signal: “Results that are politically correct – not judicially correct – are what matter to the left, and the left is not satisfied with the current Supreme Court’s decisions of late. Therefore, it wants to create one in its own image.”
Biden last week signed an order creating the commission with three dozen members. They are to produce their report in six months.
The group is being led, by Biden’s order, by a far-left lawyer who worked for the Barack Obama White House and a law professor who bashed President Trump.
“The White House announcement and the members chosen for this commission raise serious questions about its real purpose and concerns about its impact on the independence of the judiciary,” Jipping explained.
“The most obvious question is why the Supreme Court needs to be examined at all. The simple answer is that the left wants a judiciary in general, and a Supreme Court in particular, that is likely to decide cases that will further a leftist political agenda.”
He pointed out that one of the reasons for America’s independence from Britain was that King George was “trying to manipulate the judiciary.”
“The Founders designed our judiciary to be independent from the political branches. The left, on the other hand, sees judicial independence not as a principle to be defended, but as an obstacle to be overcome. This commission is part of its plan to overcome it.”
Biden said last year in an interview that the courts were “out of whack.”
His announcement for the commission was just about as fuzzy, Jipping wrote.
“The list of ‘reform’ ideas that the commission will mull over includes court-packing or, as the White House release puts it, the ‘membership and size of the court,'” he wrote.
“The only reason to expand the court is to create new vacancies that Biden could quickly fill to change how the court decides cases,” he said.
The outcome of the commission’s work may already have been decided, he pointed out, judging by the panel’s makeup.
“For example, one commission member is Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice. This organization has advocated judicial term limits and changing the method of appointment. It is hard to imagine Waldman examining the pros and cons of these reforms evenly, rather than agree with them as a foregone conclusion,” he explained.
And noted Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe is a proponent of vetting judges for their opinions on certain liberal issues before allowing them on the court.
Warned Jipping: “A majority of Americans already believe that the Supreme Court decides cases based on politics rather than the law. This commission will likely worsen that trend.”
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