Panel seated to study changes to high court

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Friday ordered a 180-day study of adding seats to the U.S. Supreme Court, making good on a campaign promise to establish a bipartisan commission to examine the subjects of expanding the court or setting term limits for justices.

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, including one to a seat that Republicans had blocked his predecessor, Barack Obama, from filling for almost a year.

The result is a court with a stronger conservative 6-3 tilt after the addition of Trump’s choices, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just days before last year’s presidential election. Trump also appointed Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

But while Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has asserted that the system of judicial nominations is “getting out of whack,” he has declined to say whether he supports altering the size of the court or making other changes — like imposing term limits — to

the current system of lifetime appointments.

Under the White House order establishing it, the commission is not set to issue specific recommendations at the end of its study — an outcome likely to disappoint activists.

In his executive order Friday, the president created a 36-member commission that will examine the history of the court, past changes to the process of nominating justices, and the potential consequences to altering the size of the nation’s highest court.

The panel will be led by Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel for Obama, and Cristina Rodriguez, a Yale Law School professor who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel under Obama.

Progressives say Republicans unfairly gained an advantage by blocking Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, and they see adding seats, setting term limits or instituting other changes as a way to offset the power of any one president to influence its makeup. Conservatives have decried the effort as “court-packing” similar to the failed effort by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.

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, particularly when Congress is almost evenly divided between the two parties. An attempt to increase the number of justices would require approval of Congress and would be met by fierce opposition.

However, “There’s growing recognition that the Supreme Court poses a danger to the health and well-being of the nation and even to democracy itself,” said Aaron Belkin, director of the group Take Back the Court. “A White House judicial reform commission has a historic opportunity to explain the gravity of the threat and to help contain it by urging Congress to add seats, which is the only way to restore balance to the court.”

The panel of scholars, lawyers, political scientists and former judges will produce a research paper designed to be an authoritative analysis of the issue. The goal, the people said, is not to settle on an answer but to provide Biden, members of Congress and the public an evaluation of the risks and benefits of making changes.

The White House said the commission would examine “the genesis of the reform debate and the court’s role in the constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the court; the membership and size of the court; and the court’s case selection, rules, and practices.”

The commission’s members include liberal scholars like Laurence Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and a leading progressive voice in the legal community, and Caroline Fredrickson, former president of the American Constitution Society.

But progressives may balk at some of the conservative members of the commission. They include Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who was a top Justice Department official under former President George W. Bush; Adam White, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School; and Keith Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University who takes an “originalist” view of the Constitution.