In some ways, there’s something enviable about Joe Biden’s position. As a lame duck, he now retains all the official powers of the presidency, but with much less scrutiny and accountability. He can ascend to no higher office than the one he has, and since he’s taken himself out of the race, he can no longer lose a job he has essentially already quit. He may have dwindling influence over a party that has already coalesced around the vice-president, Kamala Harris, as its new leader, but he retains the president’s bully pulpit in the absence of political consequence. What remains is a period in which Joe Biden can do more or less whatever he wants. And on Monday, he decided to embrace supreme court reform.

In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, and then in a speech he delivered in Austin, Texas, the president cited “dangerous and extreme decisions” by the court, along with a series of ethics scandals surrounding conservative justices, as justification for three major proposals. First, Biden called for a constitutional amendment that would clarify that presidents can be prosecuted for crimes they commit while in office, is a direct response to the court’s ruling that granted broad criminal immunity to Donald Trump in July’s Trump v United States.

That is not likely to happen: the burdens to passing any kind of constitutional amendment are prohibitive. But more crucially, the president embraced two policies that would dramatically alter the court’s functioning: a binding code of ethics for the justices – the only Article III judges who are not currently subject to one – and term limits that would allow presidents to appoint a new justice every two years, to serve 18-year terms.

The president’s proposed code of........

© The Guardian