Biden Announces Sweeping Plan to Rein in Corrupt Supreme Court

After the Supreme Court’s decision to grant the presidency near-total immunity on July 1, President Joe Biden now believes that the nation’s highest court is in dire need of reform.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post published Monday morning, Biden proposed a plan that would enforce term limits for the court’s justices, as well as a binding code of conduct. The term limits would have justices spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court, and the president could only appoint a justice every two years.

“The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court,” Biden wrote. “Term limits would help ensure that the court’s membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary.”

“It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come,” Biden added.

Biden’s proposed code of conduct would require justices to “disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest.”

“Every other federal judge is bound by an enforceable code of conduct, and there is no reason for the Supreme Court to be exempt,” wrote Biden.

In the op-ed, Biden also called for a constitutional amendment called the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment,” which would clearly state that there is “no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office.”

“I share our Founders’ belief that the president’s power is limited, not absolute. We are a nation of laws—not of kings or dictators,” Biden wrote.

Biden’s plans for the Supreme Court follow a series of scandals involving Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. In April 2023, a ProPublica investigation revealed Thomas received luxury vacations from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow, which had not been disclosed by Thomas in accordance with mandatory financial disclosure rules. More revelations of undisclosed gifts followed in August of that year, including at least 38 vacations and 26 private jet flights given to Thomas from an array of right-wing billionaires. Thomas in 2003 also accepted a free trip to visit Vladimir Putin’s hometown in Russia.

Alito has had his own scandals involving political advocacy in the form of political flags flying outside of his home, and he was also implicated for receiving gifts from Crow and other right-wing billionaires. Monday’s op-ed may not be received well from the right, but it follows months of calls for reform from judicial observers as well as Democrats. While it may not be to the level of expanding the court, as some have called for, it is a strong proposal and likely to be factored in November’s elections. 

After taking flak all week for calling Democrats “childless cat ladies” three years ago, J.D. Vance doubled down on those comments Friday in an interview with Megyn Kelly Show.

“Obviously it was a sarcastic comment,” he said on on Kelly’s SiriusXM show. “I’ve got nothing against cats... People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said. And the substance of what I said, Megan, I’m sorry, it’s true. It is true that we’ve become anti-family. It is true that the left has become anti-child.” (This is not true, at all.)

Vance insisted earlier in the interview that he was not trying to be critical of people who don’t have children: “It’s not a criticism of people who don’t have children. I explicitly said in my remarks, despite the fact that the media has lied about this, that this is not about criticizing people who for various reasons didn’t have kids, this is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.”

Well, let’s roll the tape. Here’s what he said to Tucker Carlson in 2021: 

We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?

He sure seemed to be disparaging people for being childless!

Vance’s attempted course-correction this week also doesn’t jibe with some of the Ohio senator’s weird policy ideas. For instance, he has said wants childless people to pay more in taxes and have their votes count for less. So it seems that the initial criticism he received from celebrities as well as lawmakers was warranted.

Vance has been going viral all week—in a bad way. He was found to have defended the infamous QAnon shaman from the January 6 riots, a campaign rally speech in his hometown fell flat, and he lost support from some of Trump’s allies. Even a false rumor about a sexual act with a sofa picked up steam, forcing news organizations like the AP to conduct fact checks.

The new Republican vice presidential nominee may hope that his Kelly interview will help tamp down the criticism he’s receiving, but it’s only a matter of time before something else embarrassing surfaces. The likes of Anthony Scaramucci are already saying Vance’s days are numbered, and he may end up being the worst vice presidential candidate in history.  

Right-wing conspiracy theorist and failed politician Laura Loomer launched a despicable attack on Democratic Senator Mark Kelly and his wife, gun violence survivor and former Representative Gabby Giffords, on X earlier this week.

Loomer, without evidence, cruelly accused Kelly of writing a post on his wife’s behalf from her account endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, claiming that Giffords—who was shot in the head in an assassination attempt 13 years ago—is “brain dead” and “certainly isn’t tweeting on her own.”

This wouldn’t matter much, as Loomer has engaged in white nationalism and Islamophobia before, but she is also a favorite of Donald Trump Jr., who has touted Loomer as a possible White House press secretary if his father gets elected in November. Trump Jr.’s opinion seems to carry some weight in his father’s political decisions. He reportedly pushed his dad to choose J.D. Vance, who’s friends with Don Jr., for a running mate.

Giffords was shot while holding a campaign event in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011. The bullet passed through her brain, and yet today, though she has some difficulty speaking and walking, she is able to conduct interviews. She even campaigned for Harris in Pennsylvania on Thursday. Needless to say, she is not “brain dead.”

Loomer has been banned from various social media sites in the past, only to be reinstated on X when Elon Musk took over the site. She’s not likely to face any consequences for this post, although it probably won’t help her standing in the Republican Party, where even some of the MAGA faithful aren’t big fans.

J.D. Vance thinks the “QAnon Shaman” would be “a fun guy to have a beer with.”

In a recently resurfaced speech from 2023, Vance said that Jacob Chansley, more popularly known as the “QAnon Shaman,” should have gotten a lighter prison sentence since he was only “walking around the Capitol.”

“It was a crazy guy with, like, the bullhorns … he looked like he’d be a fun guy to have a beer with, right? The Q shaman,” said Vance.

Chansley received a 41-month prison sentence in November 2021 and was charged with obstruction of an official proceeding. He was released early from federal prison and sent to a reentry center in March 2023.

Following his prison sentence, Chansley indicated he was interested in running for Arizona’s 8th congressional district seat, but he missed the deadline to get enough signatures.

One Republican actually has met up with Chansley. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she was “honored” to meet the QAnon Shaman back in December 2023 at a Turning Point USA event.

“When I spoke with Jake, he is remarkably positive, happy, forgiving, and determined. Most people would be crushed and forever destroyed after being treated so horrendously by the media and their own government, but not Jake,” Greene wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Maybe the three can grab a beer together?

The far right is zeroing in on its new attack on Vice President Kamala Harris: She is somehow solely responsible for the U.S.-Mexico border. 

On Thursday, House Republicans approved a resolution slamming Harris as the “border czar” and condemning her handling of immigration. The resolution, authored by Representative Elise Stefanik, passed in a 220–196 vote. 

“By every metric, Kamala Harris has failed to secure our borders, instead advancing far-left Democrats’ failed open border policies and the needs of illegal immigrants over the safety of America,” Stefanik argued on the House floor. 

Six Democrats also voted for the resolution: Representatives Yadira Caraveo, Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Jared Golden, Mary Peltola, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez—all of whom have also been critical of President Joe Biden’s border policies. Davis has since endorsed Harris. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the measure “fake and fraudulent,” since Harris was never appointed as a so-called “border czar.”  

But that hasn’t stopped Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and their allies, who are eager to find a way to successfully attack Harris, from pushing the term. 

During a rally Thursday in North Carolina, Trump insisted Harris “was the border czar, but she never went to the border.”

“As border czar, Kamala threw open our borders and allowed 20 million illegal aliens to stampede into our country from all over the world,” he said.

This is false. CNN pointed out in a fact-check that Harris did go to the border as vice president. Further, the total number of border “encounters” since February 2021 adds up to about 10 million, and an “encounter” does not mean someone was let into the country. 

That night, Trump’s former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed on Fox News that Biden had personally dubbed Harris the border czar. But the clip she showed to prove her point didn’t actually include Biden using the term.

Vance has said the vice president failed as “America’s border czar” and claims she “supported abolishing ICE,” something Harris has never floated. 

Let’s dispel this myth that Harris had been put squarely in charge of the U.S.-Mexico border. While it is true that in 2021, the vice president was assigned to lead a limited effort to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, Harris was not by any means in charge of the border. 

A new poll found that a whopping zero percent of Black voters in Michigan plan to vote for Donald Trump, despite all of the former president’s underwhelming attempts to shore up support in that state.

A survey of 600 likely general election voters in Michigan, released late Thursday by WDIV Local 4/Detroit News, found that zero African American respondents said that they supported Trump, while 82.1 percent said they supported Vice President Kamala Harris.

While President Joe Biden was reportedly experiencing a loss of support from Black communities, it certainly doesn’t appear that Harris will face the same difficulties now that she’s taken over the Democratic ticket. Of course, Trump has done plenty of things to dissuade Black voters from backing him in November, in just the last month or so.

In June, Trump held a campaign event at a Black church in Detroit that revealed itself to be a blatant stunt. The campaign boasted 8,000 attendees in a space that could only seat a few hundred. At the event, which was meant to shore up his support among Black voters, roughly half of the attendees were white, WDET’s Russ McNamara noted. After Trump’s church stunt, the former president ran across town to give the keynote address to his real base of white nationalists at Turning Point’s “The People’s Convention.”

Trump has repeatedly overstated his support among Black voters, who he claimed were abandoning Biden in droves. He bragged about the formation of a group called Black Americans for Trump—but he failed to mention that at least three of his new endorsers were on his family’s payroll.

Trump also found himself under fire for a remark he made in the first presidential debate about immigrants taking “Black jobs,” which had many asking, what exactly is a Black job?

One of the lead authors of Project 2025, the disturbing blueprint for a potential second Trump presidency, has close ties to a controversial international Catholic group, Opus Dei.

The Guardian reports that Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, receives weekly spiritual guidance from the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., led by an Opus Dei priest. He attends the institution weekly for mass and religious guidance.

In a speech last year at the CIC, Roberts echoed some of the same extreme measures that the Project 2025 manifesto is infamous for, such as outlawing birth control, and called on conservatives to adopt “radical incrementalism” to achieve their policy objectives.

Opus Dei has been criticized as radical, cultlike, and secretive. The organization was founded in 1928 in Spain to combat the anti-Catholic left in the country, and was later granted special rights and privileges by Pope John Paul II to respond to the rise of progressive liberation theology in Latin America. Opus Dei does not believe in the separation of church and state, seeing a symbiotic relationship between the two, and its American adherents view the United States as the last stronghold of Christianity.

Roberts’s ties to Opus Dei don’t end with the CIC. He founded a school in Louisiana, John Paul the Great Academy, that recognizes the organization’s founder, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, as its patron. He also was involved in an Opus Dei–affiliated high school leadership program in Austin, Texas, and has spoken at other Opus Dei-linked schools.

Roberts isn’t the only leading conservative close to Opus Dei, either. Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society co-chair who has led the conservative takeover of the judiciary up to the Supreme Court, is also linked to the CIC, even accepting an award from the organization in 2022. In his acceptance speech, Leo praised the center and called his political adversaries “vile and amoral current-day barbarians, secularists, and bigots” influenced by the devil.

Donald Trump and the GOP have been trying, unconvincingly, to distance themselves from the radical Project 2025, and now comes the news that the 900-page document’s leading author also has ties to a powerful religious organization opposed to the separation of church and state. Leo’s involvement only appears to be stronger evidence of the conservative movement seeking to impose a radical religious agenda if Trump wins the presidential election in November.  

It’s been one hell of a week for J.D. Vance. Sorry, that should read “hellish” week. Let’s rewind.

Last Thursday, Vance joyously accepted the nomination for Donald Trump’s running mate at the Republican National Convention. By Monday morning, everything had changed.

Vance awoke to discover that he’d become the target of Democratic vice presidential hopeful Andy Beshear, who slammed him for being a “phony” before he’d even held his first campaign event. When the Ohio senator finally hit the campaign trail, he started things off with an awkward, low-energy speech in his hometown, during which he suggested that he’d be considered “racist” for his love of Diet Mountain Dew, a strange gaffe that made him a laughingstock for a day and added fuel to the flames of Beshear’s attacks. Almost immediately, Trump allies began to suspect that the conservative calculus on Vance’s selection was fraught with errors.

All of this happened in one day. Every day since has been worse.

Over the next few days, it would be revealed that Vance had more than a few skeletons in his closet, ones that maybe hadn’t bothered anyone when he was supposed to be a mini-Trump but now seemed demonstrably damaging.

Vance drew ire for a slew of past comments, including calling Democrats “childless cat ladies,” suggesting that Trump had committed serial sexual assault, promoting a right-wing conspiracy theorist’s book that called progressives “unhumans,” and writing a favorable foreword for a book linked to Project 2025.

All of this was really bad, and none of it even held a candle to something said about Vance that wasn’t even true: A nasty rumor that he’d gotten sexual with a sectional overwhelmed social media on Thursday.

In terms of headlines, Vance has taken a serious beating.

And it seems to be translating into early approval polls.

By Friday, things still weren’t looking good. While it was previously reported that some Republican lawmakers had severe buyer’s remorse about Vance, one House Republican told The Hill that there was “major dissension” over Trump’s pick.

“The prevailing sentiment is if Trump loses, [it’s] because of this pick,” the lawmaker explained.

A few House Republicans spoke anonymously with The Hill about their take on the GOP nominee for vice president.

Vance “was the worst choice of all the options. It was so bad I didn’t even think it was possible,” one Republican representative told the outlet. “Anti-Ukraine, more of a populist. He adds nothing to the Trump ticket. He energizes the same people that love Trump.”

Another House Republican told The Hill that despite public support for Vance, lawmakers were relatively united in their hatred of him. “I think if you were to ask many people around this building, nine out of 10 on our side would say he’s the wrong pick,” the lawmaker said. “He’s the only person who can do serious damage.”

One week after his coronation, Kamala Harris’s approval rating is skyrocketing, and Vance is starting to look like the worst vice presidential candidate in history.

Right-wing attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris are skyrocketing, with conservatives attacking her record as a prosecutor, calling her the “DEI” candidate, and making desperate attempts to associate her with Communists.

One such attack came from right-wing political commentator Tim Pool, who let loose, calling Harris a “Communazi Despot come to put conservatives in concertation  camps.” The attack was so over-the-top that it even drew a reply from white nationalist Richard Spencer, who wondered, “A bit much?”

It’s hilarious that Pool, who has two million followers on Twitter, would get rebuked by an open white nationalist such as Spencer, who one would think has no love for Harris. Several commentators on X found the situation pretty funny.

Last week, Spencer caused some confusion when he endorsed President Biden over Trump, saying, “The nomination of J.D. Vance had reminded me what the GOP really is.” This was mostly due to conservative support for Israel, anathema to an antisemite like Spencer, but also possibly because of racism against Vance’s Indian American wife.

Spencer’s rebuking of Pool, while funny, has nefarious undertones. Spencer soured on Donald Trump and MAGA even before Trump’s presidential term ended, due to what he saw as his failed strategy on uniting white supremacists.

“I will never vote for Donald Trump. I wish him the worst,” Spencer told The New Republic in 2020. “I’m not exactly enthusiastic about voting for Joe Biden, but in all likelihood, I will.”

Still, infighting among the worst elements of the U.S. far right can only hurt Trump and MAGA, and give the rest of us something entertaining to read and watch.

Election authorities from around the country have officially weighed in on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s desperate claims that states won’t allow Vice President Kamala Harris on the ballot as the Democratic nominee. Their message was just the opposite: Harris is good to go. 

A CNN survey published Friday found that election authorities from 48 states and the District of Columbia said Harris would have no trouble getting on their respective ballots. 

Officials from Montana and Florida did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment, but experts indicated that those states’ election rules suggest that the vice president won’t face any friction there, either. 

Across the board, election authorities said that the Democratic Party’s decision to back a different candidate couldn’t possibly be a problem because President Joe Biden hadn’t been officially nominated. That process will take place via a virtual roll call early next month, and then more ceremonially at the Democratic National Convention later in August. 

Once a candidate and their running mate are formally nominated at the convention, their names are then submitted to the states to be placed on the ballot. Since Biden was never the nominee, he’s not technically being replaced. 

This wasn’t just the word in blue states, either: Reliably pro-Donald Trump states said the same thing. All seven swing states also confirmed that Harris would face no issues getting her name on the ballot if nominated next month. 

Johnson has repeatedly referenced vague “impediments” and “legal hurdles” the Democrats might face in installing Harris as the candidate across different states’ electoral systems, but he has neglected to explain what those issues would be. 

“It would be wrong and I think unlawful in accordance to some of these state rules for a handful of people to go in the backroom and switch it out because they’re—they don’t like the candidate any longer,” Johnson told ABC News Monday.  

Johnson’s office failed to respond to CNN’s questions about his claims.