Biden’s term has seen multiple landmark decisions and calls for reform.
President Joe Biden is leaving office after four years of influencing the Supreme Court in multiple ways, raising questions about how he will be remembered for impacting the third branch of government.
As chief executive, Biden has had the power to nominate justices and defend federal laws before the Supreme Court. He used that power early in his term to nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson, who would become the first black, female Supreme Court justice.
In doing so, the 46th president helped make history but also prompted backlash for pledging to choose a justice based on race and gender. The nomination came at a time of intense debate over meritocracy and considerations of race in fields like education.
During Biden’s term, U.S. solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar defended appeals court decisions in favor of Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s consideration of race in their admissions process, also known as affirmative action. A
landmark opinion from the Supreme Court in 2023 held that both violated the equal protection clause.
Under Biden, Prelogar also unsuccessfully defended two landmark precedents—Roe v. Wade and Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council— cases that ended in game-changing decisions for abortion and administrative law.
Each of those cases fueled Democrats’ calls for reform. In July of last year, Biden unveiled proposals for major changes to the court. In an op-ed for The Washington Post, he used the abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health to accuse the court of “dangerous and extreme decisions that overturn settled legal precedents.”
Perhaps the Biden administration’s biggest confrontation with the Supreme Court came in response to Biden’s attempt to cancel $430 billion of student debt. In its 2023 ruling in
Biden v. Nebraska, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the administration had undertaken an “exhaustive rewriting” of a federal law to achieve its debt forgiveness.
The court also asserted what is known as the major questions doctrine, which the Yale Law Journal states “instructs courts to presume that Congress does not delegate policy decisions of great economic and political magnitude to agencies.”
Although the Biden administration lost those cases as well as one regarding administrative law judges, it won others. For example, the Supreme Court
rejected a lawsuit challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of mifepristone, used in chemical abortions, and one over how administration officials pressured social media companies with regards to COVID-19 content moderation. In both cases, the Supreme Court
held that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing.
In calling for reform, Biden said the Supreme Court was “mired in a crisis of ethics.” Citing “undisclosed gifts” and “conflicts of interest connected with Jan. 6 insurrectionists,” he seemed to be referring to gifts received by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, as well as an upside down flag flying outside of Alito’s home after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. He called for term limits and a binding code of ethics. He called the court’s ethics
code, adopted in November 2023, “weak and self-enforced.”
Besides term limits and ethics reform, Biden also called for a constitutional amendment, the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment,” to counteract the justices’ holding that the Constitution affords presidents certain levels of immunity from criminal prosecution.
The court’s
decision on presidential immunity was made in response to an appeal sought by President-elect Donald Trump in the election interference case brought by former special counsel Jack Smith, whose office was part of Biden’s Justice Department.
A majority of the Supreme Court also rejected the Justice Department’s approach to an obstruction charge against Jan. 6 defendants, ruling in favor of defendant Joseph Fischer in
Fischer v. United States.
