President Joe Biden has suggested he will appoint progressive justices to the Supreme Court if he wins a second term in the White House in November.
“The next president, they’re going to be able to appoint a couple of justices… Look, if in fact we’re able to change some of the justices when they retire and put in really progressive judges like we’ve always had, tell me that won’t change your life,” he said during a campaign rally in Philadelphia on Wednesday.
The Supreme Court idea of judicial review was, essentially, created by an early Chief Justice using the classic children’s excuse “the rules don’t say I can’t do this so therefore I’m doing it and you can’t stop me”
Edit: I had this somewhat wrong. After reading, it seems a lot of the people who wrote and debated on the Constitution wrote strongly in support of judicial review, and it was in fact voted on and approved by multiple state legislatures after the Constitution was adopted. It simply wasn’t worded explicitly into the Constitution. Chief Justice John Marshall did issue an official ruling that made it a standard practice but it was not a new concept.
I do think that the idea of judicial review itself makes sense. After all, what’s the point of a constitution if the legislature can just makes laws that go directly against it? The problem, in my view, is that the constitution covers too many things, and does so in far too unspecific terms, which makes for an incredibly broad range of possible political interpretations.