AUSTIN, Texas — President Joe Biden, warning that the country’s courts were being weaponized to push an “extreme and unchecked” conservative agenda, said Monday that he would push for legislation that would bring major changes to the Supreme Court, including imposing term limits and creating an enforceable code of ethics on the justices.
Biden detailed his plans in a speech at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, his first public engagement since announcing his decision to end his presidential campaign last week.
His visit was initially scheduled as an event to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. But it quickly became a venue for Biden to begin buttoning up a 57-year legislative legacy while outlining an election-year intention to try to stop what many in his party feel is the Supreme Court’s ideological drift into conservatism.
This month, the court issued a 6-3 ruling that grants broad immunity to presidents from prosecution for actions they take while in office.
“For all practical purposes, the court’s decision almost certainly means that the president can violate the oath, flout our laws and face no consequences,” Biden said during his remarks. “Folks, just imagine what a president could do trampling civil rights and liberties, given such immunity.”
Biden, warning that “extremism is undermining the public confidence in the court’s decisions,” said that conservative plans for sweeping policy changes in a second Trump administration, known as Project 2025, would continue to push the courts to the right.
“They’re serious, man,” Biden said, referring to the Project 2025 plan. “They’re planning another onslaught attacking civil rights in America.”
Biden’s remarks were met with support from others in his party, including Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who said she was a partner in the effort and would take up Biden’s proposal in her campaign.
“These popular reforms will help to restore confidence in the court, strengthen our democracy and ensure no one is above the law,” she said in a statement sent by her campaign.
The proposal would require congressional approval and has little hope of gaining traction in a Republican-controlled House and a divided Senate. In a social media post, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., called the proposal “dead on arrival” in the House.
(Biden issued an awkward retort to reporters when he landed in Austin, declaring that Johnson was “dead on arrival.” Biden later said onstage that Johnson’s “thinking is dead on arrival.”)
Conservative activist Leonard A. Leo, who is known for making the appointments of conservative judges a core of the Republican Party’s agenda, assailed Biden’s efforts as partisan: “It’s about Democrats destroying a court they don’t agree with,” he said in a statement.
Biden and his advisers argue that Americans are broadly concerned about the inner workings of a court that has swung to the right in the years since Biden took office. Recent polls show that the Supreme Court’s approval rating is at a historic low and that a majority of Americans believe that the court’s decisions are driven by ideology.
Over the past two years, Justice Clarence Thomas has become embroiled in ethical scandals for failing to disclose gifts and luxury trips bestowed by a billionaire benefactor. Justice Samuel Alito has faced scrutiny about why flags associated with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol flew outside his homes.
At the library, Biden praised three landmark pieces of legislation passed during the Johnson administration: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act.
“Taken together, these three acts have made this nation fundamentally more fair, fundamentally more just and, most importantly, fundamentally more consistent with our founding principles,” Biden said to applause.
He said that more recent iterations of the court had “eviscerated” efforts from affirmative action to voting rights, and warned that another Trump presidency would push the court into more extreme territory. In an opinion essay published in The Washington Post, he wrote that the court’s decision to grant broad immunity to presidents for crimes they commit in office was an example of “dangerous and extreme” decision-making that had put the American people at risk.
In his remarks in Austin, Biden said the system of lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices gave a president undue influence for decades.
“I believe the best structure is the 18-year term limit that would help ensure the country would not have what it has now: an extreme court,” Biden said.
Biden said he supports a code of conduct that would require justices 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, calling them “common sense reforms that a vast majority of Americans support.”
He also called for a constitutional amendment that could limit the broad presidential immunity that the court backed at the end of its term last month. That amendment would state that the Constitution does not confer to former presidents any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction or sentencing, the White House said.
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