Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said that Democrat presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris would support packing the Supreme Court under a bill he has been pushing if she were to become president.
During the Democratic National Convention (DNC), Whitehouse participated in a panel with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) in which they discussed a “Supreme Court reform” bill that could pass by a simple majority if Democrats were to win the House, Senate, and White House. The bill would essentially impose 18-year term limits on the court, thereby removing Justices Clarence Thomas and John Roberts, while establishing ethics and recusal rules. The bill would be attached to “an omnibus package that would include a bill creating a national right to abortion and other top Democratic priorities,” per the Dispatch:
As chairman of the Senate judiciary subcommittee on the courts, Whitehouse introduced a bill last year that would create the same 18-year term limits and biennial presidential appointment pattern Biden proposed. Only the nine most recently appointed justices would be allowed to vote in almost all of the important cases, meaning that if the bill were enacted tomorrow the winner of the presidential election would effectively be able to replace Justice Clarence Thomas in 2025 and Chief Justice John Roberts in 2027.
“To get around the filibuster, we’re going to have to have a process that allows very substantial debate from the Senate minority,” Whitehouse said:
We are not going to want to give the Republicans multiple stalls, multiple filibusters on this, so the bill that gets around the filibuster will be virtually certain to include permanent reproductive rights, permanent restored voting rights, getting rid of corrupting billionaire dark money, and Supreme Court reform. If you’ve got a bill like that moving, that’s going to have spectacular tailwinds behind it.
Whitehouse made his declaration after President Joe Biden and Harris called for an 18-year term limit on Supreme Court justices. Speaking with the Dispatch, Whitehouse said that Harris would support his legislation, which Republicans and even some Democrats have said would be unconstitutional and would just be court-packing under a different name.
“They have not gone so far as to say, ‘We endorse your bill.’ They have said that your bills are precisely aligned with what we are talking about,” he told the outlet.
“Everything is subject to the will of the Senate and the House and the input from the president as we do these things,” Whitehouse added. “The point of that is that we want to make it seem a little bit less like it’s an immediate targeting” of justices.
Republicans and even some Democrats have denounced the bill. Adam White, a legal scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, whom Biden appointed to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court, wrote in July that any “legislation purporting to strip individual justices of their duties would be unconstitutional.”
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