Biden’s Unsavory Judicial Legacy

 Democrats are fist-pumping this week as Joe Biden looks poised to beat Donald Trump’s first-term record for judicial appointments. If only that number were the Biden judicial legacy to prove most lasting.

The Senate was preparing on Thursday to confirm two final judges, votes that would result in Mr. Biden tallying 235 judicial picks—one more than the 234 confirmed in the first Trump term. Democrats are raving about the number and the diversity of those judges, as well as Mr. Biden’s success in flipping the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals back to a liberal majority. Republicans are consoling themselves that Mr. Biden was unable to change the ideological direction of the Supreme Court or of two other circuits that Mr. Trump remade with majorities of Republican-appointed judges.

But it isn’t the numbers or the faces that will define the Biden years. His most lasting mark on the judiciary will be the contempt he exhibited toward the judicial branch, and his active role in undermining public faith in it. No other modern president has shown more hostility or disregard for the judiciary and its unique role in government.

Past presidents have at times demonstrated a lack of decorum and restraint when it comes to the bench. George W. Bush criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling about prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama infamously scolded the Supreme Court in front of the nation during his 2010 State of the Union address. Mr. Trump has lambasted a litany of judges over opinions he disagreed with.

Mr. Biden’s condemnation has been of a more insidious kind. He hasn’t restrained himself to taking issue with legal reasoning. Rather, he willingly joined the progressive campaign to use opinions the left dislikes to smear the Supreme Court as unethical, fanatical and partisan. Following the court’s Dobbs decision, which returned abortion to the states, he singled out “Trump” judges who would “upend the scales of justice” in a “realization of an extreme ideology.” After this summer’s ruling on presidential immunity, Mr. Biden assailed “the court’s attack” on “long-established legal principles,” including “today’s decision that undermines the rule of law.” He suggested the justices had gone this route for no other reason than to kowtow to Mr. Trump.

This criticism is more risible considering it was Biden forces that spent four years busting precedents and placing the court in no-win situations. The White House’s lawfare campaign against Mr. Trump—special counsel Jack Smith, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the criminal indictments—forced the Supreme Court to take up the question of immunity. Democrats’ investigations into Trump tax returns and Jan. 6 forced the court to rule on subpoenas and documents. An activist lawsuit claiming Mr. Trump was disqualified for “insurrection” forced the high court to overturn a Colorado ruling barring the former president from the primary ballot.

While the justices had no choice but to settle these manufactured disputes, the cases’ partisan nature guaranteed that half the country would hate any final ruling. Mr. Biden as president had a duty to condemn this political abuse of the legal system, but instead he stoked it, exhibiting a reckless disregard for the consequences for the court.

His lack of respect extended to his snubs of court rulings—for instance, ignoring the justices’ repeated findings that his student-debt forgiveness was illegal and fomenting dozens of rules with little or no basis in law. His pardon of his son—who was found guilty by a jury in one case and pleaded guilty in another—was an insult to the rule of law. His mass clemency of 1,500 people (in which the White House admitted it didn’t consider any of the individual cases’ details), showed casual disregard for every judge, clerk, lawyer and juror who sacrificed hours considering evidence and working to uphold the legal system. Mr. Biden is threatening to veto an urgent bipartisan bill to create 63 new federal judgeships over the next decade—something requested by the judiciary—in part out of petty gripes that the Senate didn’t confirm even more of his appointees.

What makes it worse is that the president, as an old Washington hand, knows better. And it’s notable that when he campaigned in 2020, he refused to join most of his progressive primary rivals in calling for legislation to pack the Supreme Court. As in all things, Mr. Biden ultimately bowed to the partisan zealots who remain furious that the Supreme Court is no longer a Democratic plaything, and whose only goal is to wrest back control by any means.

He doubled down on that position in July—days after his party gave him the boot—in a bid to rally the base for Kamala Harris. In a Washington Post op-ed, the president skewered the Supreme Court as “not normal,” “mired in a crisis of ethics,” in need of “bold reforms to restore trust and accountability.” He insisted this was necessary to “restore the public’s faith” in the court. A faith he did more than any other modern president to undermine and destroy. That’s his record.

Kimberley Strassel is a member of the editorial board for The Wall Street Journal.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/bidens-unsavory-judicial-legacy-courts-law-politics-0dfeb602