By Sofia Villa
02 Aug 2024, 05:57 AM EDT
It is late, very late, and perhaps there is very little that President Joe Biden can do, at the end of his term, with the proposal to reform the terms and to have changes of judges in the Supreme Court of Justice.
The controversy is not new; it was aired when Donald Trump appointed conservative Amy Coney Barret as his candidate to succeed feminist Democrat Ruth Barden Ginsburg, as Trump had previously managed to appoint conservatives such as Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.
Hispanics should keep an eye on the Court that John Glover Roberts has presided over since 2005, since it is there that decisive issues for immigrants are defined.
As an example, when the debate arose over the Census Bureau’s failed attempt to ask whether there were citizens in households, as a strategy to detect undocumented immigrants, in the 2020 census.
Back with Biden, I think he’s out of breath and has run out of runway to land a controversial proposal, just when everything indicates that Trump may be about to return to the White House.
For the sake of democracy, Biden is asking Congress to establish term limits and a code of ethics for judges that would restrict the possibility of receiving bribes. That wouldn’t be so bad, perhaps the mistake is that in addition to the fact that there are less than a hundred days left until the November 5 elections, he mixes this initiative with the ratification, also from the Capitol in Washington DC, of a constitutional amendment that limits presidential immunity, so that not even Trump can be above the law.
Perhaps Biden took too long to throw the dart he had been aiming at since the time of the Trump administration: he proposes changing the judges every two years, which in the end would give each jurist plenty of time to have his position secured for at least 18 years.
In his op-ed in The Washington Post, Biden explained that he respects institutions, with the separation of powers, but not even the Court should allow a person to be above the law, even if it is the boss in the Oval Office.
If we do the math, the renewal of judicial seats would begin with the current president of the Court, who is going for 20 years in his position, along with his colleague Samuel Alito who has 18, in addition to Clarence Thomas who is already almost 33 years old and, being lifers, or for life, they seem untouchable.
As an author, Sofía Villa writes this column in a personal capacity and her opinions do not represent those of Televisa-Univision, where she works as an Assignment Manager.