Vice President Kamala Harris would transform the U.S. Supreme Court if elected president, backing term limits for justices and imposing an ethical code from outside the judiciary.
These are the “reforms” proposed by President Joe Biden in July, and which Harris enthusiastically embraced. They would allow a Democratic president to replace the conservative justices who are the Court’s longest-serving members (Thomas, Roberts, Alito), packing it from within.
Biden held off on the most controversial idea proposed by left-wing Democrats, that of expanding the court to 13 members, which would (if passed by Congress) allow a Democratic president to stack the bench and achieve a 7-6 liberal majority.
Harris has previously said she was “open” to the idea of expanding the Supreme Court, and has never renounced that position. “I’m open to this conversation about increasing the number of people on the United States Supreme Court,” she reportedly said during a campaign event in May 2019.
But Biden-Harris’s proposed reforms allow Democrats to achieve the same result over time. As Breitbart News’ Ken Klukowski notes, the reforms would “fundamentally abolish the Supreme Court’s independence.”
Harris is not discussing the Court much on the campaign trail; she does not want to frighten voters. But she is fully on board with the plan to transform the Court, and so is her staff.
One of her spokespeople is Brian Fallon, who worked for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign and went on to work for Demand Justice, a group that endorsed left-wing plans to pack the court by adding liberal justices. Fallon also personally led efforts to smear Justice Brett Kavanaugh. (Fallon didn’t just want Kavanaugh to be denied a seat on the Court, but worked to have him canceled altogether, and ousted from a teaching post at George Mason University.)
The Constitution was completed on September 17, 1787, and a majority of today’s Supreme Court justices subscribe to the “originalist” idea that it should be interpreted as written.
That philosophy has restrained the worst excesses of the federal government’s power, and has restored power to democratically-elected legislatures — which is why, ironically, the Democrats, so-called “defenders of democracy,” are determined to undo the Court, if this current crop is elected.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
