[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 123 (Monday, July 29, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Page S5530]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           U.S. Supreme Court

  Madam President, the Supreme Court is under attack. Prominent 
Democrats say it must do what they want and not what the laws and the 
Constitution require.
  They have incited violence against the Court. We have had to put 
Justices under 24/7 police protection. Even so, a deranged young man is 
about to go on trial for trying to kill a Justice and his family while 
they slept in order to change the outcome of a case.
  In polling last year, the Court was the branch of government with the 
highest level of trust from the public. But that hasn't stopped 
Democrats from devoting the last 8 years from an all-out campaign 
against the Court's legitimacy--and, ultimately, against its very 
existence. Radical liberals have called for Court packing.
  Influential Members of this body, including the senior Senator from 
Rhode Island and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee have 
threatened ominously that:

       Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands 
     it be ``restructured.''

  The left wage daily warfare against the Justices, illegally picketing 
their neighborhoods with impunity, trying to harm their spouses' 
careers, and even spying on what kinds of flags they fly in their 
yards.
  Today, the Biden-Harris administration, which desperately wants these 
radical votes, is once again jumping right into the fray. After talking 
to a Harvard Law extremist who had helped then-Senator Biden stage-
manage the character assassination of Robert Bork almost 40 years ago, 
they decided the time has come to eliminate the Supreme Court as we 
know it.
  In his op-ed, the President says he wants term limits on Justices, 
never mind what the Constitution says, never mind the advice-and-
consent role of the Senate. President Biden and his leftist allies 
don't like the current composition of the Court, so they want to shred 
the Constitution to change it. He wants what he calls an ``ethics 
code,'' but that already exists. What the President is actually 
proposing is a stealth process for people other than the Justices to 
decide cases. Again, Constitution be damned.
  The fact is that President Biden himself came to office and stood up 
a Commission to investigate whether to change the Supreme Court. This 
morning, the President thanked this Commission for its ``insightful 
analysis'' that supposedly informed his reform proposals.
  Never mind now--never mind--that this Commission, cochaired by one of 
his closest political confidants, didn't actually recommend that he do 
anything. On the contrary, it explained in detail the challenges posed 
by harebrained ideas like term limits.
  As one of the Members noted:

       We ought to be really careful about tinkering with the 
     Supreme Court because you just don't know what the 
     consequences could be.

  Why is the Biden-Harris administration so willing to put the crown 
jewel of our system of government--the independent judiciary--to the 
torch? Because it stands in their way.
  Don't take my word for it. They are running ads about it. With 
pictures of the Justices on the screen, one commercial intones that the 
Supreme Court has made the President ``above the law'' because the 
former President ``asked them to.''
  What happened to respecting court decisions? The Biden-Harris Justice 
Department took an extreme position in the prosecution of their 
electoral component, and they lost.
  Rather than accepting that they lost, the Biden-Harris administration 
has responded with a full-scale attack on the Justices who ruled 
against them. This from the folks who love to remind us that ``You 
can't only love your country when you win.''
  Perhaps the President and Vice President should take a good look in 
the mirror.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The senior Senator from Illinois.