A new bill introduced by Democrat Senator Ron Wyden would add six more justices to the Supreme Court and introduce a raft of measures designed to make the Court work in the Democrats’ favour.
As well as increasing the Supreme Court’s size, the bill would make it harder for justices to overturn laws, require them to undergo audits and remove roadblocks to nominations.
The size of the court would be increased from nine to 15 over a period of 12 years.
The bill would also require a two-thirds ruling by the Supreme Court and the circuit court of appeals in order to overturn a law, and make it impossible for Senators to delay votes on new appointments. Mitch McConnell was able to delay Barack Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland in 2016, allowing Trump to replace him with Neil Gorsuch.
As The Washington Post reports, the bill would introduce stringent auditing measures for justices:
“Supreme Court justices must report income, dividends, property sales and gifts, among other things, but the bill would bolster financial checks, disclosures and other transparency measures. It would require the IRS to initiate an audit of the justices’ tax returns each year, release the results and make the tax filings public. Nominees to the court would have to disclose three years of tax returns.”
Justices would be able to force other justices to recuse themselves from cases, with a two-thirds majority.
The bill’s author, Senator Ron Wyden, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said he doesn’t believe the bill will pass in full, but he hopes to get parts of the bill into law.
Reaction to news of the bill was fierce on the right.
“With 40 days until Election Day, Democrats just rolled out the most radical and dangerous legislation to date aimed at destroying the Supreme Court as we know it,” Tweeted Carrie Severino, president of Judicial Network, an NGO that promotes fairness within the justice system.
“The new radical bill put forward by Senate Democrats is the worst attack on the Court since FDR,” she continued.
In recent years, since it obtained a conservative majority as a result of Donald Trump’s appointments, the Supreme Court has been under constant attack from the left.
The Dobbs decision in 2022, which repealed Roe V. Wade and made abortion rights an issue for the states, led to a wave of denunciations from high-profile Democrat politicians and liberal figures, including calls for the Court to be abolished and for individual justices to be impeached or prosecuted.
In July, following a ruling that extended protection to former presidents against prosecution for official acts, President Biden criticized the Supreme Court and announced his support for bills introducing a code of ethics and 18-year term limits for its members. Biden also called to make a constitutional amendment ending blanket immunity for presidents.
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