Chuck Todd: Our broken judiciary
Proposals to reform the Supreme Court don't address the core problem of partisanship that's infiltrated the judicial system.
Can you truly fix or reform something in government if you let those who created the problem attempt to solve it? That’s the question ringing in my head after hearing both President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., lay out plans they claim would reform the Supreme Court and the judiciary as a whole. The big basic idea both are advocating involves term limits for judges and Supreme Court justices and instituting an enforceable code of conduct.
Both ideas are what I call “nice-to-haves,” but they wouldn’t deal with the problem that actually exists in the judiciary: too many partisans — i.e., too many judges wearing red and blue robes — and not enough simply wearing black robes.
Another motivation for these public reform efforts also involves partisanship, as Democrats are livid over Justice Clarence Thomas’ excesses in accepting gifts from Republican donors who have business before the court. There’s no doubt this anger from the left over Thomas and, to a lesser extent, Justice Samuel Alito, who has demonstrated a belief in legislating from the bench, has more to do with the court’s rulings and sharp turn to the right than justices’ actual outside-the-court behavior.
That having been said, just because the criticism from the left may be motivated by frustrated partisans, it doesn’t make the behavior of Alito or Thomas defensible. Both justices have grown entitled in their jobs, and, apparently, so have their spouses. Their lack of self-awareness about perception of their personal actions (be it from them or their spouses) is enough to disqualify them from many basic positions in government, let alone one of the most important and powerful positions that exist.
And that entitlement development alone is a good argument for term limits of some sort for the judiciary.
Rating: 5