President Joe Biden proposed multiple Supreme Court reforms, including ensuring no immunity for crimes committed by former presidents during their term, establishing term limits for justices and implementing a binding code of conduct. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) joins "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now
00:07is Congressman Steve Cullen. Congressman, thank you so much for coming on.
00:12Nice to be with you.
00:14Earlier this week, President Biden laid out multiple Supreme Court reform proposals,
00:19including ensuring no immunity for crimes committed by former presidents during their term,
00:25establishing term limits for Supreme Court justices,
00:28and implementing a binding code of conduct. You endorsed these proposals. So can you tell us why?
00:35Well, they're all good proposals and good things we should have in our government,
00:37things the Founding Fathers never thought about. I'm sure they didn't think that there would be
00:42immunity for the president when they just fought a king in a bloody revolutionary war,
00:47where many Americans died, colonists fighting for our independence. The idea was not to have
00:53a king, you have people be the rulers, and there's never been any precedent for the king,
00:58the president, having this type of immunity. And particularly, it's Trump who's done so much to
01:04go beyond his powers by leading a coup on the United States and asking people to
01:09charge the Capitol, or you won't have a country anymore, and calling those people
01:16hostages and saying they're great heroes, and he will commute their sentences. You see a president
01:21who would take those powers he's been given with immunity and stretch them to the end, including
01:27overthrowing our government, which is, I believe, was an impeachable offense, which he was impeached
01:32but not convicted, and we should be tried in court, and we'll be, except for the Supreme Court,
01:39not slowing everything down so the wheels of justice can't spin at the right pace and allow
01:45for trial before this election, so that people will know what their precedents are. So that's
01:49one that I currently agree with. The term, nobody expected president to be humans, let alone
01:54Supreme Court justices, to live an expected life expectancy of 80 or so. When the Constitution was
01:59drawn up, I think the average lifespan is probably about 50 something years, and people have gotten
02:04older, and nobody expected they'd be on the court that long, and it's been shown that nine isn't a
02:10sufficient number. It's expanded over the years, generally in relation to the number of districts.
02:16We had circuit districts. We now have 13 districts. Expanding the court would be a good thing, too,
02:21but the term limit's idea of having an 18-year term limit and having them be on a revolving basis
02:26to where you can't have Mitch McConnell in the future use processes to deny a vote on Merrick
02:32Garland, to speed through a nomination on Amy Coney Barrett when he didn't allow a vote to be
02:39brought up on Merrick Garland, and other issues related to Kavanaugh on the FBI. All kinds of
02:47problems. And then what Alito did, his wife did, he was the first wife on flying those flags,
02:55both at his home and at his vacation home, were inappropriate for a Supreme Court justice,
03:00and what Paris Thomas has done in accepting hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars
03:05worth of gifts, where it's Winnebago, wherever it may not be in Winnebago, it's probably
03:12Cadillac in Winnebago, and for trips to exotic resorts, all paid for by Mr. Crow in Texas,
03:22and not report those, that's wrong, too. There should be a code of ethics. Every court has one.
03:26Supreme Courts divide by one, and there should be one. So, I agree with all they're saying.
03:30Whether they'll happen in this Congress, I don't think so. The Republicans won't vote for anything
03:33at all that changes the Supreme Court or their ability to influence it. So, it's unlikely to
03:40happen. Constitutional amendments would take a large supermajority in that two of the states.
03:45That's not going to happen either. But the first thing that has to happen with any kind of change
03:49is to be introduced to the marketplace of ideas and have it be discussed. So, it's good that it's
03:53in the marketplace. It's good that it'll be discussed to some extent. Jim Jordan will bring
03:57it to a vote in the Judiciary Committee to bring it up, even to be debated. But it gets there,
04:01the public knows about it, and it's where the Democrats think we should be. So, it's good
04:06that he proposed it, and that's why I support it. And it's being discussed now between you and me.
04:11So, let's start with that last proposal first. How does that binding code of ethics differ from that
04:18code of conduct that was adopted by the Supreme Court in November?
04:23Well, the Supreme Court, there's no enforcement mechanism, and they've never used it. It's just
04:29there. It's like best rules, best practices. And they haven't, as Farron Thomas, I'm not exactly
04:35sure what the rules encompass, but I'm sure they wouldn't permit somebody to buy you a vehicle,
04:40hundreds of thousands of dollars vehicle, and take you on these trips like he's done,
04:44and give them tickets to events that you can't otherwise get that cost tens of thousands of
04:48dollars, and not report. They're supposed to report they haven't done it, but there's no
04:51sanction if they don't do it. If you don't have sanctions, you don't have rules, or you can't
04:57murder anybody unless it's jail time, and it's no good. You've got to have teeth in the law.
05:04No teeth in that Supreme Court code. When it comes to term limits, the point,
05:11some would argue, of lifetime appointments is to ensure fairness. So, if there are term limits,
05:16do you think the court would have less independence? The justices would be more
05:20susceptible to being swayed at all? Well, I think they're swayed right now
05:25because they have lifetime appointments, and I think they've forgotten the whole idea of maybe
05:29why they were put there, although I'm not sure Terrence Thomas ever understood it. He holds
05:34Thurgood Marshall's seat, and he is as close to Thurgood Marshall as I am to Mars. It's just
05:40absurd the distance of the people, and that seat was supposed to be for somebody who articulated
05:44and supported issues concerning civil rights and fairness to people who've been disenfranchised,
05:49are not allowed to be part of what would be a more perfect union. So, I don't know that
05:57the shorter term, at least they know that they have a replacement, and the replacement might
06:03have a more current thought. Now, you can appoint people like
06:12Trump has appointed, who the Federalist Society have recommended, who don't think as people,
06:17I think, of their generation, but they're old heads and younger bodies. Kavanaugh,
06:24he's probably in his 50s, I think, but he thinks like somebody who's in his 80s.
06:30He's got a mentality of the 50s, 50s time calendar, not in a chronological number.
06:37Democrats like yourself have been largely supportive of these proposals. Some Republicans,
06:44not so much. One Republican in particular, Senator Mitch McConnell, did say this,
06:49President Biden and his leftist allies don't like the current composition of the court,
06:53so they want to shred the Constitution to change it. What do you make of his response?
07:00Well, that's just hogwash, gibberish political doublespeak. When you call your Democratic
07:07colleagues leftists, you should discount anything the man has to say. That is something Trump has
07:12put in the lexicon. We're left of him. We're left of most Republicans, but most of us are not
07:19leftists, and that's the kind of rhetoric that is wrong in America, and it's the kind of rhetoric
07:24that makes things wrong. And Mitch McConnell doctored the Constitution within the spirit of
07:29the Constitution by not allowing Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland that came forth,
07:34I think, in February of this last year in office, say, too close to the election. But then when
07:40Justice Ginsburg died, and he put Amy Coney Barrett through in less than a month before
07:46the election, I think she came in in the weeks of the election, it showed he has no moral integrity.
07:50He has no moral compass. He's a pragmatic, transactional politician, and with the
07:58exception of saying Trump was wrong on January 6th, which he then took back and
08:03then became a lapdog once again, he's lost all credibility. You know, what's going on right now,
08:12it's sad. We watched the Olympics, and one thing the Olympics ought to teach us
08:17is that we're all human beings all over the world, and whoever's competing,
08:21competes with the black, white, tall, short, whatever. They compete, and the winner is
08:27crowned, and everybody accepts the winner, and we don't call them names, compete against them,
08:35and then we treat everybody equally. The American team is largely made up of African-Americans
08:42on the gymnastics, African-American people of Asian descent, that's the Asian women's gymnastics
08:50team, and I guess it's the male gymnastics team, too. To some extent, there's a couple of folks on
08:55there, but the track team is mostly African-American. The swimming team is mostly white, but we're all
09:01Americans, and we're proud of each of them, and we cheer for each other on the basketball court. We
09:05cheer for them. They're all black. Soccer, we're mostly white, but not all. We cheer for them,
09:11and we don't do it in politics. In politics, it's a dog-eat-dog, and it's name-calling. It got worse
09:18and worse with Trump. I mean, to your point, the Olympics has been a beautiful sign in unity and
09:24patriotism. Politics in today's world, maybe not so much, but back to Mitch McConnell's point about
09:31the Constitution, do you think that these proposals are, in your words, doctoring the Constitution?
09:41No, you don't shred it when you amend it. The Constitution has an amendment clause. There's a
09:45matter to amend it, and the founding fathers knew it needed to be amended. It's been amended
09:5020-some-odd times, and what the proposal would be would be to amend the Constitution on the terms
09:55of office of the Supreme Court justices, and that would be permissible. If you do it by legislation,
10:01you'd have to do it in a super powerful way, and I don't think that could happen, and I think that
10:05would violate the Constitution. I hope it's to amend it, and that's what we need to do is to
10:09amend the Constitution, and that's a difficult process. I've amended our state constitution
10:13for state lottery. It took me 20 years to do it, so I know what long fights are.
10:18I guess you're anticipating this is going to be a long fight because Senate Minority Leader
10:23McConnell also said that this is essentially going to be dead on arrival to Congress,
10:28so what do you anticipate this fight is going to be like to ultimately, in your hopes, get it passed?
10:36Well, there'll be discussion in the Senate where Senator Durbin and the Senate White House,
10:41White House. There'll be others, of course, but that's the two leaders on these issues.
10:49We'll discuss it in committee, and they may have votes. The House isn't getting anything,
10:54you understand that, but at least we'll get discussion and debate in the Senate.
11:00A new Gallup poll shows that the approval for rating for the Supreme Court is at a near
11:06historic low at 43%. Do you think that these types of proposals will make Americans believe
11:13in the court once again that approval rating will go up? It would go up if there were term limits.
11:18It would go up if there was a code of conduct that they were required to adhere to and that
11:23there were sanctions if they violated it. It would certainly go up. Whether this court could
11:29do those things, it's very hard. I had great faith in Justice Roberts. I met with him on
11:33several occasions when I was a chair of a subcommittee in the history committee that
11:37dealt with the courts, and we had discussions on occasion. I had respect for him, and I thought he
11:41cared about the courts, but lately, he's been voting 6-3, and the vote to trump the USA to
11:48give these godlike, kinglike powers to the president are just anathema to me and to anybody
11:52who believes in the Constitution. There was no precedent for it at all. Then, in the Dobbs
11:56decision, it took away a woman's right to vote. It's a ripped-up, roving, not woman's right to
12:01vote, but a woman's right to choose, and it tore up Roe v. Wade. There was no precedent for that
12:06either. The precedent was that there was penumbral rights. There was a right to privacy. Roe v. Wade
12:10was accepted as the law, and they all said when they came through there to the nomination process
12:15that they would abide by precedent, and they basically suggested Roe v. Wade was not going
12:20to be overturned. They lied. The Supreme Court lost a lot of its respect because they lied during
12:29the confirmation process. I mean, Kavanaugh's main thing he's remembered for is, I like beer.
12:37Democrats clearly, as you said, weren't happy with Roe v. Wade being overturned.
12:42Are these proposals a direct response to that?
12:47It's partially a response to Roe v. Wade, but it's also a response to Clarence Thomas's
12:52egregious conduct and accepting all these monies. I guess it was the same man, Mr. Crowe,
12:58paid for a house for his mother, paid for a home, took his house. I think they're going to build it
13:03into a monument to Clarence Thomas, paying for the education of one of his stepchildren or
13:09godchildren. It's just any other public official would be in jail for doing what Clarence Thomas has done.
13:20Do you think, are you suggesting then that Justice Thomas should be in jail?
13:25I think that other public officials would be, because there are laws that don't allow that type
13:29of behavior. It's called bribery, and it's called robbery or extortion, or taking public services,
13:39public gifts to influence your public decisions on it. But you should not be accepting outside
13:46gifts, and you can't in Congress, and you can't in most public offices, and if you do,
13:52you're in big trouble. And we've seen that what's happening in other jurisdictions.
13:57What do you say then to Republicans who are criticizing Democrats, saying, hey, they don't
14:02like the few decisions that the Supreme Court has made, so they want to change the rules now.
14:08What do you say to that? It's not just a few decisions. It's lots of decisions where they
14:13don't have precedent. They've taken away the rights of the regulators who know more about
14:20the subject matter than courts do, which was shown in the opinion when Gorsuch didn't even know
14:27what some of the chemical agents were, and he said something was a laughing gas,
14:32and it wasn't laughing gas. He didn't know, and it showed that the experts know,
14:37and they're the best ones to make the rules and regulations, and that decision will set back
14:44environmental law in this country and conservation law.
14:49But they've done it there. They've done it with guns. They've done it with guns,
14:52and they've let guns run rampant in our country. They did it with bump stocks.
14:56They've done everything to not make this country safe for people walking on the streets, breathing
15:00the air, or feeling that the court is representing the Constitution and justice rather than themselves
15:06and their work-related friends. Congressman, before I do let you go,
15:10I want to go a complete 180 now and get your reaction to news today. I do understand you've
15:16had a busy morning because prisoners like Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street
15:21Journal reporter, were freed in an elaborate prisoner swap between Russia, the United States,
15:27and some other Western countries. What's your reaction to the news?
15:32Well, I was overjoyed to hear it. Vladimir Karl Merz, who was one of the individuals released,
15:36he's got a green card in America. His wife and children are American citizens. They live in
15:42Virginia. He was an op-ed for the Washington Post and other papers writing about Russia,
15:47and he's a great hero. He's a hero to me. I met him. I know him well. I know his family.
15:53He came to me one day, and he said, don't you think the organization, the OSCE, Organization
15:58for Security Cooperation in Europe, of which I'm a member of the United States, should have a
16:02special representative for the prisoners? And I'd never thought about it. We had special
16:06representatives on anti-Semitism and certain other issues, and I said, well, that makes sense. It
16:12doesn't make sense. And he said, well, would you get in touch with the president and suggest that
16:19we do that? I said, I'd be happy to. And I did, and I know he did, too. And then he came to me
16:23one day, and he said, I think he'd be a good special representative. Would you be willing
16:28to serve? And I said, it'd be an honor. And I was appointed. And I know, in retrospect,
16:34he knew he was going to, when he went back to Russia, he was going to be arrested,
16:37and he was going to be a political prisoner. And he was looking for me to look after him,
16:41which I did. And he told me that the worst nightmare, the worst thing that could happen
16:45was for the prisoner to be forgotten. And every chance I could, I let people know about Vladimir
16:50Kramer and his heroism. He'd twice been poisoned by Russians, and he thought it was close to death.
16:56People thought he was going to die, and he didn't. And yet, he went back. He said, I must go back.
17:01I'm a Russian politician. I cannot be outside the country when my people are in the country
17:06trying to get my freedom and democracy. I'm a free Russian. We will have a free Russian.
17:12So, we went back, and he got arrested on trumped-up charges. I gave a speech at the
17:15University of Arizona, Arizona State, about the war in Ukraine. He didn't call it a special
17:20military operation. He was sentenced to 25 years with no help. I thought he would die in prison
17:24like no other. So, I was happy. I was certainly happy for Yursevich, too, and for the lady that
17:29was with Radio Free Europe and for Paul Weyland. There are others that should be released, too.
17:34There's a lady there. I think she was an actress or a ballerina, and she gave $50, $25, to some
17:40group in Ukraine. She served a long time, and she's an American citizen. There are others that
17:44was a teacher who I think had a small amount of pot, and he's been sentenced to many, many years.
17:49So, I was happy today. It was a great day. President Biden was at his best. He's a diplomat.
17:55Secretary Blinken worked with him and, of course, Jake Sullivan, and they got the job done. It took
18:00a long time, and they pulled Germany and Poland and Norway and Slovenia to be involved in this.
18:07They all gave up something. Some of them, I don't think, got anything. There were a couple of
18:11Germans released from Russia. There were several friends of Navalny in Russia who were released.
18:16I guess they'll come to the West, but it was a great day for diplomacy. It was a great day for
18:22freedom, and it's wonderful to see these people united with their families, particularly Vladimir
18:27He's one of my heroes for all time. Have you been able to talk with him today?
18:33No, I don't think anybody has. He's not in good health. He's been taken to Ramstein Air Base in
18:38Germany, which has a wonderful medical facility, and that's where his wife and children were taken
18:43to meet him. He had problems with his feet. He'd been in solitary confinement for, I think, two
18:48years, and he had some problems to start with, and they got worse. So, he's going to be in the
18:53hospital, I'm sure, for a while. Hopefully, they can correct whatever problems he has or cure
18:58whatever problems he has. He can return to America. I sent him an email and just said,
19:03welcome home, pal, and I sent Evgenia an email and said I had the L.S. for her. It was just about
19:08three weeks ago, or maybe a month, that the democracy movement's dinner in Washington,
19:18and I presented an award to she and her husband at that dinner, and she's done a great job
19:22representing his views, articulating the need for a free Russia, and trying to replace Vladimir,
19:28which is impossible to do, but she's done a great job. They're a remarkable couple.
19:33And it's certainly a great day for America and journalists as well. We all celebrate the return
19:38of Evan Gershkovich. Congressman Steve Cohen, thank you so much for the conversation today.
19:43I hope you join me again. I hope so, too. Nice to be with you.