Group to study expansion, terms

President Joe Biden has ordered a study on overhauling the Supreme Court, creating a bipartisan commission Friday that will spend the next six months examining the issues of expanding the court and instituting term limits for justices, among other issues.

In launching the review, Biden fulfilled a campaign promise made amid pressure from activists and Democrats to realign the Supreme Court after its composition tilted sharply to the right during President Donald Trump’s term.

During the campaign, Biden repeatedly sidestepped questions on expanding the court. A former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden has asserted that the system of judicial nominations is “getting out of whack,” but has not said if he supports adding seats or making other changes to the current system of lifetime appointments.

The 36-member commission, composed largely of academics, was instructed to spend 180 days studying proposed changes, holding public meetings and completing a report. But it was not charged with making a recommendation.

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 who served in the Office of Legal Counsel for Obama. Other prominent members include Walter Dellinger, a former top Supreme Court lawyer for the government during the Clinton administration; Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe, who has supported the idea of expanding the court and Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The makeup of the Supreme Court ignited again in 2016 when Democrats declared that Republicans gained an unfair advantage by blocking Obama’s nomination of then-judge Merrick Garland to fill the seat left empty by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Then-senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, a Republican, refused to even hold hearings on filling the vacancy.

In the wake of Mcconnell’s power play, some progressives have viewed adding seats to the court or setting term limits as a way to offset the influence of any one president on its makeup.