• On Monday, President Joe Biden announced an ambitious three-part plan to reform the Supreme Court. He’s calling for term limits, a binding ethics code, and a constitutional amendment to limit presidential immunity from prosecution. Biden’s proposals have little chance of making it through a divided Congress. However, Melissa Murray, co-host of Crooked’s legal podcast ‘Strict Scrutiny,’ says it shows that Democrats are finally waking up to the ways the court controls the party’s ability to get things done.
• And in headlines: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening a “severe” response to the recent air strike that killed 12 children in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, protestors filled the streets in Venezuela after the government announced the re-election of authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro, and the U.S. Men’s Gymnastics team won their first Olympic medal in 16 years.

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TRANSCRIPT

Josie Duffy Rice: It’s Tuesday, July 30th. I’m Josie Duffy Rice. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And I’m Tre’vell Anderson and this is What a Day, the show where we’re creating a database of every Republican who reacts to being called weird by having a televised meltdown. 

Josie Duffy Rice: It’s just like not a good strategy if you’re trying to beat the weird allegations. You can’t freak out about being called weird. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right? You can’t be weird while saying you not weird. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Exactly. 

Tre’vell Anderson: This you know defeats the purpose. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Defeats the purpose. [music break] On today’s show, former President Donald Trump will speak with the FBI about the attempted assassination against him as more details about the shooter emerge. Plus, Turkey’s president threatens to send its military into Israel to stop attacks on Gaza. 

Tre’vell Anderson: But first, President Joe Biden is calling for reform of the Supreme Court. He first announced a three part plan in an op ed published by The Washington Post on Monday. And later in the day, while at an event commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. He said this. 

[clip of President Joe Biden] My fellow Americans, based on all my experience, I’m certain we need these reforms. We need these reforms to restore trust in the courts, preserve the system of checks and balances that are vital to our democracy. 

Josie Duffy Rice: I mean, I’m thrilled to see this. As we’ve talked about on the show, I’m very pro court reform. So tell us about these three parts of Biden’s proposal. 

Tre’vell Anderson: So reform number one is a call for a constitutional amendment called the no one is above the law amendment, which would ensure that there is no immunity for crimes committed by a former president while in office. Reform number two involves instituting 18 year term limits for justices so that there’d be some sort of regular rotation among them. 

Josie Duffy Rice: These are good. And then there’s also this third one, which is something that we’ve talked about on the show, which is a binding code of conduct for the justices. And look, this is not expanding the court, which is my personal preference of reform. But it is it’s something it’s more than what we have right now. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Absolutely. And it’s super necessary, right. At least on this code of conduct part, because there have been a host of ethical questions, particularly of some of the conservative justices that have come up in the last year or so. Now, to be clear, none of these reforms can happen without Congress’s buy in. And we know that the bulk of Republicans in the House and Senate would not vote for these measures, at least not while the court has a conservative super majority. But I wanted to talk through these ideas nonetheless. So I spoke with friend of the pod, Melissa Murray. She’s co-host of the podcast Strict Scrutiny and a legal scholar, and I started by getting her initial reactions to Biden calling for Supreme Court reform. 

Melissa Murray: I was like, Joe, what took you so long? I mean, Joe Biden has, like, gotten his whole life together in the last week. I mean, this man is free. He is not running, and he has zero fucks left and he’s doing it all. And and I mean that sincerely. I think that is a really huge thing, both for Joe Biden personally and for the Democratic Party as a political entity. This has been a party that has been so loathe to run on the court to make clear to their audiences how important the courts are. Like everything we do electorally can get eliminated by a five to four decision in the United States Supreme Court, but now it seems it’s gotten away from them. There’s a six to three conservative supermajority that in every year there has been a six to three conservative supermajority has overturned a previous precedent. So it was Dobbs in 2022 overruling Roe versus Wade. And also another case, Bruen, that blew open the right to keep and bear arms, making it possible for individuals to carry arms in public. The next year, they overturned affirmative action, and now this year, they have overturned Chevron. This is a massive case for the administrative state. It makes it much harder for agencies to regulate, to protect our environment, to protect our workplaces, to do all of the things we expect government to do. And in addition to decimating the administrative state, they also granted a broad grant of immunity to the president, basically making it okay to crime all the time if you are president of the United States. And I think for most of the American public, it was a big wakeup call. Something is not right. And even Joe Biden had to step up and say, yeah, I’m an institutionalist, but this institution is fundamentally fucked up. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. You just mentioned one of the three parts of Biden’s plan or hope to overhaul the Supreme Court, the first being a constitutional amendment that would limit immunity granted to presidents. This is obviously a direct rebuke of the Supreme Court’s decision last month to grant former President Donald Trump broad immunity for his role in the insurrection. What would it take to ratify a constitutional amendment like this? 

Melissa Murray: So you’re asking two different questions, like your sub question here is does this have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually happening? So no. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, has already said this is a dead letter, dead on arrival. You need to pass this as a statutory matter. Any of these measures as statutory matters. You’re going to need majorities in Congress, which the Democrats don’t have. It’s really hard to amend the Constitution. We’ve only done it 27 times. We did ten of those 27 times, like within a year of the Constitution being ratified as a condition of getting the Constitution ratified. So this is all outlined in article five of the Constitution. And essentially you have to go through Congress. You have to have two thirds of both houses of Congress, and then you have to go to each state legislature and get three fourths of the state legislatures to sign on to it as well. And so that’s really difficult. I mean can you imagine trying to amend the Constitution in ordinary times? Very difficult, extraordinarily difficult in the times that we live in where Congress is riven right down the middle with sort of even divisions on both sides, it’s going to be very hard to get a supermajority in either house and then going to the state legislatures, many of which are extremely gerrymandered in one direction or the other. It’s going to be very hard to get a supermajority there, too. 

Tre’vell Anderson: So Biden is proposing 18 year term limits for the Supreme Court justices. Seems like a long time for them to be there. The president would get the chance to, you know, make an appointment every two years. I wonder from your perspective, even though, right, the possibility of this actually passing is very, very slim. It’s likely not going to happen. But that idea of term limits and then the term limits being 18 years, does that seem like a workable solution to the issues being presented here? 

Melissa Murray: Well, sure, it’s workable. And how do I know it’s workable? Because it works for all of these other constitutional courts around the world. Like, you know, we’re the outliers. Other systems, other countries that have modeled their constitutional systems on the United States have instituted innovations that we can’t do because of the difficulty of amending the Constitution. And among those innovations is they have term limited justices, like this idea that you literally die in office, they don’t have that. You know to be really clear, there was a moment when I think I was really skeptical of term limits. I wrote an op ed for The New York Times probably eight years ago, where I worried that having term limits might lead to really opportunistic behavior among the justices. So, for example, a justice recognizing that this particular configuration of the court was on a limited time frame was going to end, might start doing sort of really extreme things to maximize the impact of that particular configuration before it changed. And, you know, those are all real issues. But I think what changed it for me was seeing Justice Clarence Thomas run a whole separate income stream by getting an emotional support billionaire to essentially fund him and his lifestyle off the books and separately for so many years. Like, if that’s what you’re going to do with a lifetime appointment than a lifetime appointment doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s really problematic for the legitimacy of the court. It’s really problematic for the public sense that the court is above the fray and neutral. And I think it’s also important um to note that what term limits could do, and the idea that President Biden has floated is that the terms would be 18 years, and every president would essentially get to appoint two justices in her time in office. That lowers the temperature so that whenever we do have a vacancy, it doesn’t feel like, oh my God, is everything going to change? Am I going to be a handmaiden if so-and-so gets to be a justice, or if so-and-so doesn’t get to be a justice? And I think lowering the temperature on the court and its implications for our politics would be really, really important. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. And you just mentioned those emotional support billionaires. That brings us to the third prong of Biden’s approach here, which is calling for a binding code of conduct for the justices. We’ve seen them having very questionable behavior, okay, over these last couple years in particular. But Biden didn’t lay out what enforcement could look like. But how do you think that could work? 

Melissa Murray: I think your point is absolutely correct. Like I don’t know anyone other than Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito who could get away with this, like if Justice Sotomayor was traveling with a billionaire. Um. You know, having all of her vacations funded by billionaires, she would be off this court in like five seconds. We would have ethics reform in, like two minutes if that were the case. And this is not a big lift or a big deal like most workplaces have general guidelines for what you can or cannot accept and certain sort of codes of conduct that you have to observe. Like, why wouldn’t that be the case for the nation’s court of last resort? Um. Lower court judges have a code of ethics. It’s not especially toothsome, but it’s something. And it seems likely that the Supreme Court could also have something that would at least give the public a sense that there is some propriety here, that this isn’t a court that’s up for sale, because right now it feels like a court that’s for sale. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. And like you just said, all of these proposals won’t actually go anywhere without at least some Republican support. So putting that aside for a minute–

Melissa Murray: –Don’t get excited that this is going to happen. Get excited that we’re even talking about it because this is–

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. 

Melissa Murray: –not what Democrats do. So this is liberals, progressives and Democrats recognizing that their political fortunes can rise or fall with the court. And that, I think, is absolutely huge. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. I mean, and do you think that these, you know, ideas here go far enough to, as the president says in his op ed, restore the public’s faith in our judicial system? 

Melissa Murray: Well, I love that as a candidate, Kamala Harris has immediately come out and said, yeah, cosign like plus one. I am for that. And so, you know, in the event that there is a [?] and I sincerely hope there will be, I think this kind of court reform is going to be on the front burner. If it’s Donald Trump, I think this kind of court reform is going to go into the circular file, because this is a man who has been made by this Supreme Court. And we cannot forget that when we talk about the court facilitating politics, this is a conservative six to three supermajority that has greased the wheels for Donald Trump at almost every turn. 

Tre’vell Anderson: That was my convo with Melissa Murray, co-host of the podcast Strict Scrutiny, which is available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. 

Josie Duffy Rice: That is the latest for now. We’ll get to some headlines in a moment, but if you like our show, make sure to subscribe and share with your friends. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Josie Duffy Rice: Let’s get to some headlines. 

[sung] Headlines. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening a, quote, “severe response” to the recent airstrike that killed 12 children in the Israeli occupied Golan Heights. Israel has blamed the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah for the attack, but the group has denied any responsibility. Netanyahu made his comments about retaliation during a visit to the scene of the attack on Monday. Meanwhile, hundreds of residents of the area protested his appearance and demanded that the fighting with Lebanon stop. And in another potential escalation to Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, Turkish President Erdogan made a threat of his own on Sunday. In remarks to members of his political party, Erdogan suggested sending Turkish military forces into Israel to stop the ongoing destruction in Gaza, where the Israeli military has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians since the October 7th Hamas attack. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Protesters filled the streets in Venezuela on Monday after the government announced the reelection of authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro, in what many consider to be a rigged election. The country’s Maduro aligned election council announced the president’s victory without releasing final vote totals or allowing election monitors full access to paper tallies, and the opposition party claims to have records showing their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, winning in a landslide with 70% of the vote to Maduro’s 30%. Maduro’s ten years in office have been defined by poverty and economic mismanagement, and the flight of nearly eight million Venezuelans from the country. If he were to lose his grip on power, he could be exposed to legal consequences for the drug trafficking and corruption charges he faces in the U.S. or the crimes against humanity he’s being investigated for by the International Criminal Court. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Former President Donald Trump will speak with the FBI as part of its investigation into the assassination attempt against him. An FBI special agent told reporters on Monday that the interview with the former president is a standard procedure for the agency, as it continues to look into the possible motives that the shooter had for targeting Trump. So far, the FBI has not found any evidence to suggest the assassination attempt was politically motivated. The agency did release a statement on Friday confirming that Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet during the shooting, but more evidence has come out that shows just how severely law enforcement mishandled the July 13th Trump rally. Senator Chuck Grassley showed reporters text messages sent by members of a local emergency services unit who provided assistance on the day of the rally. A counter sniper in the unit first noticed the shooter about 90 minutes before the shooting took place, and roughly 30 minutes before the shooting, another member of the same unit took pictures of the shooter after noticing him using a rangefinder. He lost sight of the shooter and sent a text telling the unit to consider notifying the Secret Service. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And the U.S. men’s gymnastics team said sorry ladies, but guys can do backflips too, and won their first Olympic medal in 16 years on Monday in the team event in Paris. Yes, it was a bronze, but that’s okay too. All right. Japan took gold and China won silver. Yet it is still a history making comeback for the five man U.S. men’s team, which has been totally absent from the podium since the 2008 Games in Beijing, a period in which the U.S. women’s team has taken home gold twice in 2012 and 2016. Olympic gymnasts are judged on both the execution and difficulty of their routines. In order to medal on Monday, members of the U.S. team had to deliver nearly flawless performances, considering that their difficulty scores were low relative to Japan, China, and Great Britain. I want to tell you all very briefly about a man named Frederick Richard. He be flipping Josie. Okay, a whole lot. 

Josie Duffy Rice: I wish you did Olympic commentary. 

Tre’vell Anderson: [laughing]

Josie Duffy Rice: My life would be so much better. 

Tre’vell Anderson: It could be me and Flavor Flav. 

Josie Duffy Rice: No, no. Just you. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Well, he’s already over there. 

Josie Duffy Rice: That’s fine. [laughter] That’s fine. This is for me. [laughter] Okay. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Just for you. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Just for me. And those are the headlines. 

[AD BREAK]

Josie Duffy Rice: That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe. Leave a review. Hop on the pommel horse to celebrate team USA men’s gymnastics and tell your friends to listen. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And if you are into reading and not just the words Supreme Court Code of Conduct over and over again like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter, check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Tre’vell Anderson. 

Josie Duffy Rice: I’m Josie Duffy Rice.

[spoken together] And Republicans are weird. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Well, at least the majority of y’all. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Look, it’s just true. [laughter] [music break]

Tre’vell Anderson: What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Bill Lancz. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. We had production help today from Michell Eloy, Ethan Oberman, Jon Millstein, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.