President Biden is telling you exactly what his vision of 'Supreme Court' reforms really is: a lawfare cudgel that will be unfairly applied and enforced based on the ideology of the Justice in question.
I propose Supreme Court Justices be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have conflicts of interest.
— President Biden (@POTUS) July 31, 2024
The Court is not self-policing.
So, it’s time for a mandatory Code of Conduct.
Let's start with the obvious: this isn't happening. Not under Biden, and not under the next administration. It is bloviating of the highest order: a virtue signal to the Left that Biden (who has been in office for 50 years) is now really serious about reforming SCOTUS as he's halfway out the door of the Oval Office.
He's not, and he wasn't serious about reforming SCOTUS for the last five decades because it didn't have a conservative majority. And that's what this all is.
The proposed 'rules' governing those things he mentioned above -- gifts, public political activity, and case recusal -- will not be consistently applied.
We all know this.
Look at the hysterical media coverage of the 'Appeal to Heaven' flag at Justice Samuel Alito's house. This flag was not an issue when it appeared at BLM riots in the summer of 2020, nor when it was flying outside San Francisco's City Hall. No, it became an issue when the media needed it to be, and only then.
This -- the Left argued -- showed a bias making Alito unfit for office.
And don't even get me started on the smear campaign against Clarence Thomas. His wife, you see, likes Donald Trump. Therefore Thomas must recuse himself from cases. Or else, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin. He's an evil genius who has 'assembled a network' of former clerks that 'wield influence' at law schools, etc. Or the smears against him regarding Harlan Crow.
The Left will argue with a straight face that it was Republicans who politicized the judicial appointment process, not those upstanding Democrats. As if they forgot Robert Bork. We didn't.
I remember the hit job Biden himself tried to pull on Clarence Thomas, the smearing of Brett Kavanaugh as a drunken, rapey frat boy or the attacks against Amy Coney Barrett.
What a monster. Kick her off the court. How dare he represent Fox News.
Meanwhile, Justice Sonia Sotomayor's staff 'prodded' colleges, libraries to buy her books, gave what could be classified as a political speech at Berkeley, and a talk on 'justice' at Harvard. Meanwhile, Justice Elena Kagan took several trips and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took 14 trips in 2018.
But the only ones making splashy headlines are Alito and Thomas. That's not a coincidence.
And I'm supposed to believe the aforementioned rules Biden wants will be fairly applied?
That's adorable.
The media -- who can't be bothered to look into the masked, uniformed 'Patriot Front' members, but can hunt down a guy who made an unflattering CNN gif -- will commit entire staffs to digging into conservative Supreme Court Justice's backgrounds and families.
They will leave no stone unturned in their pursuit of finding something they can turn into a smoking gun to get those Justices off the Supreme Court so the Democrats can install a reliable Leftist in their place.
We see this pattern play out time and time again: what's a parking ticket for a Democrat is a felony for a Republican. It's why the January 6 protesters got 840+ years in prison while the pro-Hamas rioters from last week walked without even a slap on the wrist.
I said yesterday Biden's reforms are a political temper tantrum, but they're also so much worse: it is applying lawfare to the Supreme Court.
Rules that will be unfairly applied, unequally enforced, and used to tip the balance of the Supreme Court in the favor of the Left.
