Biggest Risk if Biden's Supreme Court Reform Becomes Reality

President Joe Biden's sweeping proposals to change the U.S. Supreme Court and presidential immunity are being met with a variety of opinions. Brad Jacob, a Regent University professor and legal expert, detailed Biden's plans for CBN News, explaining his view the president's proposals are rooted in what he believes to be political "discontent." "The primary thing that's going on here is discontent within the political left with recent decisions of the Supreme Court," he said. "And that's nothing new. I mean, throughout our nation's history, if people believe the Supreme Court has messed something up, people try to figure out ways to deal with this." Constitutional amendments have been aimed at changing Supreme Court rulings in the past, but Jacob said Biden's current push concerns the court's structure. In recent years, some progressives have pushed for court-packing, which is "adding more justices so that the current president could put on a bunch of people who agree with his viewpoint and overrule the other side." But the current proposal from Biden deals, instead, with term limits. "Primarily, what's going on, there [are] folks who believe they're losing in the Supreme Court today [and they] want to change outcomes, which honestly, is not the correct way to approach this," Jacob said. "The Supreme Court is not supposed to be a partisan political animal. The justices are supposed to decide cases correctly under the law." The problem with trying to change the court's structure, he said, is that the other side will simply try to do the same thing when given the opportunity. "In reality, it's very hard to remove a justice from the court," Jacob said. "The idea of that was to let the judiciary be independent, to keep it free from partisan politics." Jacob went on to provide the strongest arguments for and against term limits. As for the former, he said some presidents don't appoint any justices while others get to appoint a number of them. The imbalance can sometimes be evident in the court's composition. "I think there's a worthwhile conversation about something like 18-year term limits for justices... you'd have to stagger it starting out, but then every two years, one justice would reach the end of his or her term and have to leave the court," he said. "And every president, unless someone resigns or dies early, every president would nominate exactly two Supreme Court justices in a four-year term."