President Biden spoke about his plan to reform the Supreme Court on Monday.
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NewsTranscript
00:00First, I'm calling for a constitutional amendment called no one is above the law amendment.
00:14It holds, and I mean this sincerely, it holds there is no immunity for crimes former president
00:23committed while in office.
00:26I share our founders belief that president must answer to the law.
00:35The president is accountable.
00:37The exercise of the great power of the presidency.
00:40We're a nation of laws, not kings and dictators.
00:48The decision can be boiled down to the title of one case, Trump versus the United States.
00:53The court asserted it was making a ruling for the ages.
00:58That isn't true.
01:01The court made a ruling for one, a former president.
01:05No other president in our history has asked for this kind of immunity for criminal actions.
01:10And no president, no former president, not me, not one, not one has and should have been
01:19given, given any exception to this with such immunity.
01:26The second thing I'm asking for, we've had term limits for presidents of the United States
01:31for nearly 75 years after the Truman administration.
01:36And I believe we should have term limits for Supreme Court justices of the United States
01:39as well.
01:40In fact, the United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime
01:56seats in their high court.
01:59Term limits would help ensure that the court membership changes with some regularity.
02:05That would make timing for the court's nomination more predictable and less arbitrary, reduce
02:12the chance that any single presidency imposes undue influence in generations to come.
02:20The bipartisan commission I convened analyzed various term limit structures.
02:25Based on their report, I believe the best structure is the 18-year term limit.
02:30So it would help ensure the country would not have what it has now, an extreme court
02:36that's proud of an attack on the confirmation process that's been weaponized by those seeking
02:42to carry out an extreme agenda for decades to come.
02:45By the way, these guys mean it.
02:49These guys mean it.
02:51Project 2025 is real.
02:54They mean it.
02:56Third, I'm calling for a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court.
03:13Supreme Court's current ethics code is weak and even more frightening, voluntary.
03:21Any code of Congress must be enforceable.
03:24Under the reform I propose, justice would be required to disclose gifts, refrain from
03:31public political activity, recuse themselves in cases in which they have, they or their
03:35spouses have a financial or other conflict of interest.
03:39Most people don't realize that Congress passed a law decades ago that says all federal judges,
03:47including Supreme Court justices, have to recuse themselves in such cases.
03:52But the current justices insist on enforcing that requirement themselves without any public
03:58oversight or compulsion.
04:01See, that's their decision.
04:03They don't have to tell us how they made it.
04:07That might work if the court was actually enforcing those requirements, but they are
04:11not.
04:12The court is not self-policing.
04:15The court is not dealing with the obvious conflicts of interest.
04:19We need a mandatory code of ethics for the Supreme Court and we need it now.