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Biden says he’d create commission to study reform of courts ‘getting out of whack’

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said in an interview on “60 Minutes” he would create a bipartisan commission tasked with making recommendations on reforming the court system — but he didn’t specify whether he would support adding additional justices to the Supreme Court.

Court expansion has been a major topic of discussion following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a member of the court’s liberal wing. Senate Republicans have promised to confirm President Donald Trump’s nominee Amy Coney Barrett — which would lock in a 6-3 conservative majority on the bench — to fill the vacancy before the election.

In 2016, the Senate refused to confirm or having a hearing for then-President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland because it was an election year, and the vacancy left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia remained for around a year. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the time said the voters should decide who fills the seat through the 2016 presidential election, but now says Barrett should be confirmed before the election because Republicans control both the White House and Senate.

Biden, however, hasn’t yet embraced the possibility of “court packing,” or adding justices to the bench.

In 2019, the former vice president said “we’ll live to rue that day” if the court is expanded and that doing so would cause the court to “lose all credibility,” Politico reports. He’s also declined multiple times to answer definitively whether he would expand the court if elected.

In an interview set to air in full Sunday, Biden told “60 Minutes” the court system is “getting out of whack.”

“If elected, what I will do is I’ll put together a bipartisan commission of constitutional scholars — Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives — and I will ask them over 180 days to come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system because it’s getting “out of whack,” he said.

But he told “60 Minutes” it’s “not about court packing.”

“There’s a number of other things that our constitutional scholars have debated and I’ve looked to see what recommendations that commission might make,” he said.

Biden said in the interview the “last thing we need to do is turn the Supreme Court into just a political football.”

“Presidents come and go, Supreme Court justices stay for generations,” he said.

Expanding the court is a controversial idea.

The Supreme Court has consisted of nine justices for more than 150 years, but the Constitution doesn’t require a specific number. The court has been expanded or condensed six times.

To expand the court, Democrats would need to pass an bill through both halls of Congress and have it signed by the president. Democrats already control the House of Representatives but are in the minority in the Senate.