Study ordered about growing bench

Washington » President Biden on Friday was to order a 180-day study of adding seats to the Supreme Court, making good on a campaign-year promise to establish a bipartisan commission to examine the potentially explosive subjects of expanding the court or setting term limits for justices, White House officials said.

The president acted under pressure from activists pushing for more seats to alter the ideological balance of the court after former President Donald Trump appointed three justices. The result is a court with a stronger conservative 6-3 tilt.

In his executive order Friday, the president will create a 36-member commission charged with examining the history of the court, past changes to the process of nominating justices, and the potential consequences to altering the size of the court. The panel will be led by Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel for former President Barack Obama, and Cristina Rodriguez, a Yale Law School professor.

The issue of whether to alter the size of the court, which has been set at nine members since just after the Civil War, is highly charged. An attempt by Biden to increase the number of justices would require approval of Congress and would be met by fierce opposition. The commission’s members include liberal scholars like Laurence Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, and Caroline Fredrickson, the former president of the American Constitution Society.