Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Last week our lame duck President Joe Biden came out of hiding and called for some major changes in how the U.S. Supreme Court operates.
His proposals — another election-time pander to his party’s progressive base – were liberal, pie-in-the-sky ideas that everyone knows will never materialize in the real world.
They included getting Congress to impose term limits and a binding code of ethics on justices, neither of which could get the required votes in a divided Congress.
Biden’s most foolish idea of the week, however, was his call for a constitutional amendment to strip the president of immunity for crimes committed while in office.
He dubbed it the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment,” but if he were an honest president, he would have called it the “Let’s Hang Donald Trump Amendment.”
The proposed amendment states that the Constitution “does not confer any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction, or sentencing by virtue of previously serving as president.”
Biden’s constitutional Hail Mary is DOA, of course, because it would require the approval of 38 states and the House of Representatives.
Everyone knows what tricks Biden and the Democrats are up to with the Supreme Court.
Changing its size by adding more justices and imposing term limits of 18 years are bald partisan attempts to gain control of a conservative branch of government that stands in the way of their “progressive” pipe dreams.
Biden’s ideas to radically change the Supreme Court are not just dangerous to the country, however, they’re proof of how dumb he and his fellow Democrats are.
When is it going to dawn on them that the laws they pass in Congress to punish Republicans or Donald Trump today will inevitably come back to bite them in the butt tomorrow?
Their biggest blunder, and the lesson you’d think they’d never forget, was in 2013 when the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate under Harry Reid decided to change the rules for approving federal judges.
Democrats at the time were frustrated because Republicans in the Senate were blocking the confirmation of about 100 of President Obama’s judicial nominees and other federal appointees.
So Reid changed the Senate’s filibuster rule (which said a super-majority of 60 votes was needed to end unlimited debate on any piece of legislation) to no longer apply to lower-level federal judges.
Lowering the required confirmation vote to a simple majority – 50 senators – was a sly political move at the time. But it was also extremely short-sighted.
Soon afterward, Republicans took control of the Senate and the new majority leader, Mitch McConnell, decided to get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, too.
Whoops.
Apparently, Democrats had assumed the White House, the Senate and the House would be controlled by Democrats for the rest of eternity.
But then Donald Trump came to town and followed the new rules the Democrats left him.
He ended up with three new conservative Supreme Court justices – who couldn’t have gotten over the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle in a million years – being confirmed by simple majorities.
Given the Biden family’s shady business activities, I’d think Joe would be a big fan of presidential immunity. As that old saying goes, “What goes around comes around.”
Michael Reagan is the president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Contact him at: