Booker says reform will ‘restore a lot of legitimacy’ to the Supreme Court

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said Monday that reforming the Supreme Court will “restore a lot of legitimacy” to the bench.

Booker said he backs “common sense” reforms to the Supreme Court during an interview Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” This comes as President Biden revealed he will be backing such changes to the nation’s highest court, including imposing term limits on the justices.

Booker said Monday he hopes Republicans will work with Democrats on these proposals to reform the Supreme Court, noting that people have been “talking about term limits on both sides of the aisle for a very long time.”

“These are steps that we are going to have to take because what’s happening to the court right now is it’s being de legitimized by the kind of politics and partisanship of our era. We need high ethics standards. We need term limits, we need predictability. We need to end this arbitrary nature of appointments and people deciding whether they want to step down or not,” he said.

“These are common sense things that I think actually will store a lot of legitimacy to the court,” he added.

Booker explained Monday that term limits would put the United States in line with other constitutional democracies around the world.

“We’re this outlier. In many ways we corrected that with the presidency by putting term limits, but now we have lifetime appointments, which creates a system in which a president who appoints someone only when that person decides to resign,” he said.

“You create this arbitrary system where you often are incentivizing people to stay on for far too long. Giving term limits actually give some regularity and predictability to our courts,” he added.

In a op-ed for The Washington Post on Monday, Biden outlined his proposals for reforming the Supreme Court. These include establishing term limits for the justices, endorsing a binding code of ethics for the justices and proposing a constitutional amendment to counteract the high court’s recent decision on presidential immunity.

“I have great respect for our institutions and separation of powers. What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach,” Biden wrote in Monday’s op-ed.

Calls for Supreme Court reform have risen over the past year, after reporting revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas accepted tens of thousands of dollars in hospitality, luxury travel and other favors from a conservative donor. Other reporting later found that Justice Samuel Alito accepted a luxury vacation from wealthy benefactors without disclosing it publicly.