Turley: Liberal push to radically reform Supreme Court poses risks, faces obstacles

President Joe Biden recently declared his desire to push significant Supreme Court reforms before departing the White House in January, but it has not always been clear whether his vice president, Kamala Harris, was on board.

As constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley points out in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Harris -- who has since been declared the Democratic Party's presidential candidate – has since given her support to the president's verdict on the state of the court, but substantial obstacles to his plans that could include forced removal of Supreme Court justices still stand in the way.

Court packing, term limits, and more

Turley notes that Harris and her cohorts have for years signaled an openness to radical changes such as court packing.

Expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court to be filled, presumably, by liberal justices, is something progressive forces within the Democratic Party have strongly urged of late, and Harris has done nothing to indicate her own opposition to the idea.

Such plots are, according to Turley, “part of a growing counterconstitutional movement that began in higher education and seems recently to have reached a critical mass in the media and politics.”

Turley goes on, “The past few months have seen an explosion of books and articles laying out a new vision of “democracy” unconstrained by constitutional limits on majority power.”

As evidence of this surge in such thought, Turley references Ivy League law professors Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn's 2022 op-ed titled, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed” and liberal legal pundits suggesting that the First Amendment is an outdated and dangerous concept potentially worthy of abandonment.

Progressive power play envisioned

Turley notes that Harvard professor Michael Klarman has already outlined a blueprint through which he says Democrats, if they secure the House, Senate, and White House, could put “democracy-entrenching legislation” in place to prevent any future Republican electoral win absent a GOP shift leftward.

“The Supreme Court could,” he lamented, “strike down everything I just described, and that's something the Democrats need to fix,” likely via a court-packing plan of one form or another.

In Turley's estimation, this “cry for radical constitutional change in shortsighted. The constitutional system was designed for bad times, not only for good times. It seeks to protect individual rights, minority factions and smaller states from the tyranny of the majority. The result is a system that forces compromise.”

“The true danger to the American democratic system lies with politicians who would...destroy our institutions in pursuit of political advantage,” Turley adds.

While it may be true that nearly 70% of Americans have indicated support for term limits and mandatory retirement ages for Supreme Court justices, it is the hope of Turley – and millions of his fellow citizens – that left-wing efforts to gut the constitutional system of checks and balances will ultimately go down to crushing defeat.