President Joe Biden and Democrats are pushing for “unconstitutional” changes to the Supreme Court after suffering stinging losses in multiple landmark cases, noted attorney Alan Dershowitz said Monday.
President Joe Biden proposed reforms to the Supreme Court in a Monday op-ed in the Washington Post, citing the court’s ruling in United States v. Trump that granted immunity from prosecution for a president’s official acts and claiming the reforms, including 18-year-terms for Supreme Court justices, were necessary to “strengthen the guardrails of democracy.” Dershowitz disputed Biden’s claim, instead saying that Biden’s concern was more about “the fact that they lost” major cases in the Supreme Court.
“Then we get to the real point of what they want: They don’t care about the structure, the Supreme Court, about term limits,” Dershowitz said. “They care about the fact that they lost in the Supreme Court. They lost Roe versus Wade. That’s when it really started, ‘Let’s pack the court. Let’s turn the court more to the left,’ and then, of course, the most recent decision involving presidential immunity.”
WATCH:
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and upheld Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy Friday in a 6-3 ruling. That year, the high court also struck down New York’s concealed carry law requiring “good cause” to issue a license to carry a firearm outside one’s home and ruled that the exclusion of religious schools from a government voucher program was unconstitutional.
In the Supreme Court’s term that ended July 1, in addition to ruling that presidents had immunity from prosecution for official acts, it also overturned what was known as “Chevron deference,” which required courts to defer to interpretations of law by regulatory agencies and ruled that fines imposed by administrative law judges violated the Seventh Amendment. The court also held that the Justice Department wrongly used a statutory provision to prosecute participants in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol building.
Earlier, Dershowitz said that the term limits would be struck down as unconstitutional, accusing Biden and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe of seeking a “campaign issue.”
“You can’t create term limits. I’m actually in favor of term limits,” Dershowitz said. “If I were rewriting the Constitution, I would probably say judges and justices should serve 15 years, 18 years, 20 years, 10 is too short, 25 is too long, somewhere in between, I would support that. I think that makes sense.”
“But the constitution has a specific provision in it. It says that justices shall serve during good behavior,” Dershowitz continued. “Those are the words of the Constitution, which means, until they resign, retire, or they die, and that’s been what’s happened since 1793, but Laurence tribe and his student Biden think you can change all that legislatively. No, you can’t, you have to do it by constitutional amendment.”
Featured Image Credit: Screenshot/Rumble/The Dershow
