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Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
What happens in November at the ballot box is crucial because of what must be accomplished in 2025 in Congress.
The freedom to vote had a big moment last week. It was not about how citizens should vote in 2024, but what might happen in 2025. It was a rousing affirmation that could lead to sweeping reform — and may signal a momentous fight ahead.
The Freedom to Vote Act would guarantee early voting and vote by mail, establish automatic registration, ban gerrymandering, bring disclosure to dark money in elections, and strengthen public campaign financing and safeguards against election subversion. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the strength of the Voting Rights Act after it was gutted by the Supreme Court.
This package would be the most significant democracy reform in two generations. It would strike a blow for racial justice. It would strengthen our system of self-government to better represent the people of a changing, growing country. H.R. 1 and H.R. 4 came within two votes of enactment in 2022. Now it is clear that bold democracy reform is at the center of the public agenda going forward.
As policy — and politics — this is a big deal.
Last Wednesday in Chicago, the Brennan Center and Democracy SENTRY held a conversation on voting rights in 2025. Hundreds filled two rooms. We heard from Rep. Joe Morelle, the ranking member of the House Administration Committee, and Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois. We heard from Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, one of the country’s foremost election officials. And we heard from top civil rights leaders Maya Wiley of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Damon Hewitt of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Marc Morial of the National Urban League.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer keynoted. He made clear that the bills are a priority and that he hoped to pass them by February 2025, even if doing so requires changing the rules to allow their passage with a simple-majority vote. “This is vital to democracy,” he told reporters. “This is not just another extraneous issue. This is the wellspring of it all.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Rules Committee, closed the event. She movingly described stepping over broken glass in the Capitol on the evening of January 6, 2021, to ensure that the electoral votes were counted. She explained that the fight over the bills, including frustration with outdated Senate rules, galvanized senators to prepare to act when they have the chance.
The Washington Post saw the significance of lawmakers’ focus on these bills, with a lead story on its website.
And the next night, Vice President Harris promised to sign the two bills.
As policy — and politics — this is a big deal.
Voters and democracy face rising attacks as Election Day approaches. We’ve seen moves to make it easier to block the verdict of voters in Georgia and other states. Defying half a century of precedent, a federal court ruled that voters can’t sue under the Voting Rights Act. Hundreds of millions of dollars from secret donors have flooded elections. As a recent Brennan Center study noted, the racial turnout gap between white and nonwhite voters in states once covered by the Voting Rights Act has grown twice as fast as in the rest of the country. This package would stop this wave of voter suppression in its tracks.
It’s also important politically.
The health of American democracy has ranked among the top issues this year in polls. We must protect against authoritarianism and a repeat of January 6. But what matters most is not what we’re against, but what we’re for: a democracy in which every eligible citizen can vote, have their vote counted, and trust the results.
Amid partisanship and polarization, we should not let obstruction block vital legislation.
Another important audience should take note of the cheers for reform: political insiders who sometimes discount public enthusiasm for democracy reform. As I told the attendees at the Brennan Center’s event, “This is not a messaging bill. It’s for real.” Remember: voting rights failed in 1957, 1960, and 1964 before being enacted in 1965.
How will this play out? We hope leaders from all parties will work to protect the freedom to vote. The last time the Voting Rights Act was considered, in 2006, it passed the Senate unanimously. In 2022, on the other hand, only one Republican senator was even willing to consider supporting the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Sen. Ted Cruz, recognizing the broad popularity of these measures, last time called for an “under-the-dome strategy,” a euphemism for a no-holds-barred filibuster. Amid partisanship and polarization, we should not let obstruction block vital legislation.
At the Brennan Center, we’re proud that so many of the policies in these bills draw on our research and work over two decades. Here’s our commitment: if there is a chance to enact this legislation in 2025, we will do everything we can to make it happen.
As I said in Chicago, over recent years we’ve all been unnerved by the rise of the election deniers. But now there is a democracy movement — deep, diverse, and strong. If we all do our part and do it right, we can make that democracy movement the story of the coming years.
Key changes for this unaccountable public institution should be part a critical and central part of the 2024 debate.
Supreme Court reform is an issue whose time has come.
In 2021, President Biden appointed me to serve as a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. We were publicly instructed at the outset not to reach conclusions — and we didn’t! (At last, a government agency that works.)
We heard from dozens of public witnesses — 17 on day one alone. They disagreed about many things. But one after another, conservatives and progressives alike said almost offhandedly that of course they supported term limits. It reflected a nascent national consensus.
Still, our report received little more than a terse White House acknowledgment. That makes Biden’s eloquent embrace of reform all the more striking. In a Washington Post op-ed, he declared, “What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.”
What changed? The Supreme Court has vast power and minimal accountability. Public trust has plunged to the lowest level ever recorded. The Court is mired in corruption controversies. And the Trump v. United States ruling giving presidents broad immunity will sanction executive lawbreaking on an unprecedented scale.
Biden backed 18-year term limits for justices, with a regular appointment every two years. He called for binding ethics rules for justices to replace the toothless ethics code the Court hastily posted online last year. And he supported a constitutional amendment to undo the appalling immunity decision.
In many ways, these are conservative ideas. Term limits rest on a foundational premise of accountability: nobody should hold too much public power for too long. George Washington taught us that when he stepped down after two terms. A binding ethics code confirms that nobody is so wise that they can be the judge in their own case. And the constitutional amendment would restore the understanding that held for two centuries: presidents are not kings, and nobody is above the law. This compelling package would save the Court from itself.
Supreme Court Reformyoutu.be
Reform will now be a central public issue going forward. Vice President Harris, running to succeed Biden, endorsed the push. Nobody pretends the changes will happen this year. But if the political stars align after the November election, as Politico reports, things could change fast.
Not surprisingly, the new call for reform has drawn fire. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal called it “political.” Today they called it “radical.” Who knows what they will call it tomorrow?
In fact, a broad and growing public consensus supports term limits. Few policy ideas have such durable bipartisan appeal. According to a recent poll by Fox News, 78 percent of Americans support the idea, up from 66 percent in 2022. A few years ago, the National Constitution Center convened progressive and conservative scholars to put forward dueling ideas for Court reform. Both groups embraced term limits.
So did John Roberts. While working as a White House attorney, he wrote that term limits “would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence” and “would also provide a more regular and greater degree of turnover among the judges. Both developments would, in my view, be healthy ones.” Indeed, the idea was first pushed in 2002 by Federalist Society cofounder Steven Calabresi in an article with liberal constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar.
Now, nobody is under any illusion that bipartisan public support will cause partisan division to melt away in Congress. But if the public’s support is strong enough, the political system can be prodded to respond.
One critic, a fellow commission member, warns this is merely a repackaging of dreaded “court packing.” The Journal editorialists call it “court smacking.” But that dad joke inadvertently reveals the truth. This idea is not a retaliatory expansion of the Court designed simply to outvote conservatives, which might in turn be followed by a further expansion to overwhelm the liberals and so on. It is a principled way to bring the Court into line with a changing country. It would also align the Court with the practice of supreme courts in all but one state, for example.
Term limits can be enacted by constitutional amendment, to be sure, and they also can be enacted by statute. As another fellow commission member, constitutional law scholar Kermit Roosevelt III, explains in Time, Congress has the power to create senior judgeships with different and limited responsibilities, and courts, including the Supreme Court, have upheld that. One version of the proposal would apply the idea to sitting justices. As Roosevelt writes, “David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, and Stephen Breyer are all still Supreme Court Justices, even though they are retired. None of them has left their office.” Another would apply only to new justices while giving the president the power to make an appointment every two years. Details remain to be worked out (including whether current or only future justices would be covered).
Some say all this will politicize the Court. Consider me shocked, shocked that there is politics around Supreme Court nominations. We all know how intense, poisonous, and partisan nomination battles have become. Justices now routinely squeak by on a party-line vote. The legendary New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse put it well: “With the accuracy of a drone strike, the three justices appointed by President Donald Trump and strong-armed through to confirmation by Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, are doing exactly what they were sent to the court to do.”
Term limits and regular appointments would help drain the toxicity of the confirmation process. Each nomination would matter less. If candidates felt it necessary to hint at whom they would appoint in advance, so what? Trump announced that he would only appoint justices from a list given to him by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. (Yes, the same Heritage Foundation, publisher of the notorious Project 2025, that Trump now claims never to have heard of.)
Above all, this makes the issue of Supreme Court reform a central topic going forward. The Brennan Center’s newly launched Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court will do its part to bring substantive depth to discussions of a subject that is far from new. The Court and its role have been central political topics many times. Outrage at Dred Scott lifted Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party into the White House. Theodore Roosevelt campaigned against reactionary rulings and urged reform in his 1912 run. Conservatives from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump vowed to change the Court.
In short, this is not a distraction from urgent political debates, as some argue. Voters will cast ballots this year in large measure driven by their views of rulings such as Dobbs, which reversed the Constitution’s guarantee of reproductive freedom. Candidates will make pledges about what kind of justice they would appoint, as they should. But reform of a corrupted and unaccountable public institution should be part of the debate as well. As it has been at every moment of peril and progress for American democracy, in 2024 the Supreme Court will be on the ballot.
"These popular reforms will help to restore confidence in the court, strengthen our democracy, and ensure no one is above the law," said Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday detailed his plan to reform the U.S. Supreme Court and address one of its most controversial recent decisions in an op-ed published by The Washington Post.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, quickly endorsed his plan, which calls for term limits for Supreme Court justices, an enforceable code of ethics, and a constitutional amendment reversing the court's decision to grant presidents broad immunity for official acts.
"These popular reforms will help to restore confidence in the court, strengthen our democracy, and ensure no one is above the law," Harris said in a statement.
"Americans deserve a Supreme Court they can trust. It's time for Congress to follow the White House's lead and take action to rein in this out-of-touch court."
After long resisting calls to push court reform, Biden told progressive lawmakers he would propose a plan earlier this month. His shift came weeks after a series of court rulings that granted current and former U.S. presidents broad immunity; overturned the Chevron doctrine empowering federal agencies to rely on their expertise in crafting environmental, public health, labor, and other regulations; and supported the criminalization of homelessness.
The majority-conservative Supreme Court—three of whose members were appointed by former U.S. President Donald Trump—has also in recent years reversedRoe v. Wade, ended affirmative action, and struck down Biden's student loan forgiveness program. It has done all this even as Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have been at the center of a series of ethics scandals involving undisclosed gifts from right-wing billionaires and a refusal to recuse themselves from Trump's immunity case despite signals that they or their loved ones supported the January 6, 2021 insurrection to overturn the 2020 election results.
"What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public's confidence in the court's decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms," Biden wrote on Monday. "We now stand in a breach."
Biden first called for an amendment to the Constitution called the "No One Is Above the Law" amendment, which would address the court's decision on presidential immunity by clarifying that no president is broadly immune from criminal prosecution, including for official acts.
"We are a nation of laws—not of kings or dictators," Biden wrote.
Next, Biden backed a system of term limits for the court whereby a president would appoint one justice every two years to serve a total of 18 years.
"The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court," Biden noted. "Term limits would help ensure that the court's membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary. It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come."
Finally, the president called for a binding ethics code, as every other federal judge is subject to.
"This is common sense," Biden wrote. "The court's current voluntary ethics code is weak and self-enforced. Justices should be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest."
Biden stopped short of endorsing court expansion, a move backed by many court reform advocates. It is also unlikely that any of Biden's proposals would currently pass the Republican-controlled House or win over the 60 votes needed in the Senate.
"President Biden's plan renews the system of checks and balances and also establishes binding ethics reforms for a court that has been embroiled in scandal in recent years."
Still, his proposal was welcomed by accountability and good governance groups.
"This is a remarkable and historical step forward on the path to reforming SCOTUS," Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, said on social media. "No one should have public power for so long; no one should be the judge in their own case; and no one should be above the law."
Craig Holman, Ph.D., government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, said in a statement: "The White House's endorsement of these critical court reforms comes at a time of increasing questions about the lack of transparency and accountability at the court. The White House's new calls for court reform will vastly boost the prospects of moving this reform legislation forward."
Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert said that the group "enthusiastically supports this effort by the Biden-Harris administration and lawmakers to impose term limits and a binding code of ethics on the Supreme Court, and we applaud the support for an amendment to ensure that no president is above the law."
Stand Up America noted that court reform is widely popular with U.S. voters: A vast majority want Congress to pass reform, including 18-year term limits, and 78% want it to impose a code of ethics.
"Americans' confidence in the Supreme Court is at historic lows, which is no surprise given the Roberts Court's blatant disregard for ethical standards, long-standing precedent, and Americans' fundamental freedoms," Stand Up America's executive director, Christina Harvey, said. "We applaud President Biden and Vice President Harris for supporting urgently needed reforms to restore trust in our nation's highest court."
Stand Up America's founder and president Sean Eldridge said on social media that the 18-year term-limit proposal in particular was a "huge step forward for meaningful court reform."
Both Eldridge and Harvey noted that 49 out of 50 U.S. states impose either term limits or retirement ages on their top judges, or have them chosen via election.
"The Supreme Court should be the gold standard for judicial ethics, yet conservative justices have accepted millions of dollars in gifts, attended private retreats with billionaire conservative donors, and failed to meet legal disclosure requirements," Harvey said. "Americans deserve a Supreme Court they can trust. It's time for Congress to follow the White House's lead and take action to rein in this out-of-touch court."
The Congressional Progressive Caucus seemed ready to take up that challenge.
"We are grateful to President Biden for taking action on this longtime priority of the progressive movement to address the crisis facing our democracy," Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) said in a statement. "We call on our colleagues in Congress to protect the foundation of our country by passing the Judiciary Act to expand the Supreme Court; Supreme Court Ethics, Transparency, & Recusal Act (SCERT) to require a binding code of ethics and transparency measures for justices; and the TERM Act setting term limits for justices."
Another way Congress could act would be to put forward Rep. Ro Khanna's (D-Calif.) Supreme Court Term Limits and Regular Appointments Act, which journalist John Nichols noted had many things in common with Biden's proposal.
In a thread on social media, Nichols put the movement for court term limits in the context of U.S. history.
"The U.S. has since its founding regularly amended the Constitution to guard against an imperial presidency—including the term limits outlined in the 22nd Amendment and ratified in 1951. Now, President Biden proposes judicial term limits to guard against an imperial Supreme Court," he wrote.
After describing the president's plan, Nichols continued: "President Biden's plan renews the system of checks and balances and also establishes binding ethics reforms for a court that has been embroiled in scandal in recent years—as justices have refused to recuse themselves from cases where they have conflicts of interest."