Photo by Jim Small | Arizona Mirror
A coalition of Arizona progressive groups are calling on Congress to take swift action on proposed structural reforms they say will provide greater accountability and balance to a high court to a “broken” U.S. Supreme Court that “has been captured by dangerous right-wing interests.”
In a letter to Arizona’s congressional delegation, the 15 progressive groups urged support for the court reforms that President Joe Biden proposed in July. Biden wants Congress to pass 18-year term limits for justices, with a president appointing a new justice every two years, and to approve enforceable conduct and ethics rules that would require disclosure of gifts, bar public political activity and ensure recusal from cases where a justice or their spouse has a financial or political stake.
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The president’s proposal comes as public trust in the high court flags after recent ethics scandals and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 that bucked popular opinion on abortion. GOP leaders have said Biden’s proposal is “dead on arrival.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, panned Biden’s announcement as a “radical overhaul” and “logical conclusion to the Biden-Harris Administration and Congressional Democrats’ ongoing efforts to delegitimize the Supreme Court.”
“It is telling that Democrats want to change the system that has guided our nation since its founding simply because they disagree with some of the Court’s recent decisions,” he said in a statement shortly after Biden’s plan was unveiled.
The Arizona progressive groups said the Supreme Court’s recent action allowing a restrictive voter registration law to go into effect in the Grand Canyon State just weeks before the election amounts to a “last-ditch effort to suppress the vote” that has led to “chaos and confusion.”
“This case is the culmination of a 50-year project on the right to capture the courts with partisans who will rule not based on the law, but based on political affiliation,” the groups wrote.
And that followed a ruling earlier in the summer granting broad immunity protections to former President Donald Trump, who is facing a swath of state and federal criminal charges for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election he lost to Biden and the subsequent failed insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.
“The justices dropped their façade of nonpartisanship, and what we have known for too long became irrefutable: The U.S. Supreme Court has been captured by dangerous right-wing interests and those intent on brandishing the law as a political weapon to advance their dangerous agenda over the will of the people,” the groups wrote.
“Arizonans cannot afford to see their rights eroded and their basic liberties thrown into chaos because of repeated unchecked judicial overreach from the nation’s highest court,” said Stasha Rhodes, the campaign director of United for Democracy, a nationwide coalition of grassroots organizations, labor unions, and advocates for progressive causes that organized the Arizona letter.
The groups that signed the letter are: Arizona Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Advocates; Arizona Faith Network; Arizona Jobs With Justice; Arizona NAACP State Conference; Civic Engagement Beyond Voting; Common Defense; Empowering Arizona, Inc; Fuerte Arts Movement; Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA); National Council of Jewish Women Arizona; Progress Arizona; Promise Arizona; Reproductive Freedom For All Arizona; Supermajority; and Worker Power.
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