This week, President Biden, in his infinite wisdom, introduced his plan for “reforming” the Supreme Court. Guess what? It features an unconstitutional proposal for imposing term limits on justices. Because when the left doesn’t like the game, they try to change the rules. This follows years of relentless leftist attacks on constitutionalist judges like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Can someone remind Biden that the Supreme Court is supposed to be independent?
Biden’s excuse for these so-called reforms? He claims they’re necessary because the current Supreme Court undermines public confidence and negatively impacts our freedoms. Oh, please. The truth is, the left is throwing a tantrum because recent rulings have actually upheld the Constitution’s limits on government power.
Biden’s hypocrisy on “personal freedoms” is laughable, especially when you look at the recent dissents by left-wing justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. They seem more interested in expanding government power than protecting our freedoms. Take the case of SEC v. Jarkesy, where the Securities and Exchange Commission prosecuted investment adviser George Jarkesy Jr. using one of their own employees as a judge. Shockingly, this “judge” found Jarkesy guilty and slapped him with a $300,000 fine. Jarkesy rightly challenged this kangaroo court, arguing that it violated his Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. The Supreme Court’s majority, those six justices Biden loves to hate, agreed with him.
Yet Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson saw no problem with bureaucrats playing prosecutor, judge, and jury. Chief Justice Roberts rightly pointed out that this gives the government too much power, allowing them to penalize citizens without a jury or independent judge. But these dissenting justices would rather tear down the Constitution’s protections and let the government run wild.
Sotomayor’s dissent, backed by Kagan and Jackson, claimed nothing in the Constitution requires a jury trial for civil penalties in securities fraud cases. This view would enable a despotic government to prosecute without due process. It’s a frightening endorsement of unchecked government power that Biden seems all too happy to support.
And it doesn’t stop there. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the same trio of justices dissented when the Court tossed out the Chevron doctrine. This 1984 decision let federal agencies interpret statutes however they liked, as long as their interpretation was “reasonable.” Over time, this gave bureaucrats near-unlimited power.
Chief Justice Roberts, in his majority opinion, slammed this deference to agencies as a disruption of the Constitution’s separation of powers. He emphasized that the courts are supposed to check the executive branch by correctly interpreting the law. Yet Kagan and her cohorts saw nothing wrong with letting unelected bureaucrats decide how far they can go in regulating the lives and businesses of Americans.
Kagan’s stance would leave us at the mercy of swarms of unaccountable officials. It echoes one of the complaints about the English monarchy in the Declaration of Independence. Ironically, the same leftist justices who are okay with expanding federal power are quick to curb local governments’ ability to maintain order. In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, Sotomayor and Kagan and Jackson argued that local ordinances against camping in public parks violate the Eighth Amendment. Seriously? The Eighth Amendment was meant to prevent barbaric punishments, not to stop cities from addressing homelessness.
Justice Gorsuch rightly pointed out that solving the homelessness crisis should be left to the democratic process, not dictated by federal judges. But adopting the leftist justices’ views would turn them into super-legislators, overriding local laws they dislike under the guise of constitutional interpretation.
So, when Biden claims we must defend democracy against conservative Supreme Court appointees, what he means is he wants to keep expanding government power unchecked. This isn’t about democracy; it’s about control. And the left will stop at nothing to get it.
