Rather than take a position on court expansion, Mr. Biden said in October 2020 that he would create a commission to study the issue after the election. He later gave it a mandate to study many other proposals for overhauling the Supreme Court as well.
The commission has conducted much of its business in public. Its draft final report, released on Monday evening, hews closely to the broad takeaways of previous working group materials it had developed. Since its last meeting in November, the commission has revised those materials and converted them into chapters of a unified document.
As in earlier draft versions, the chapter on court expansion describes arguments for and against it, while emphasizing that its own members had sharply diverging views on the idea.
“The commission takes no position on the validity or strength of these claims,” the report’s executive summary said. “Mirroring the broader public debate, there is profound disagreement among commissioners on these issues. We present the arguments in order to fulfill our charge to provide a complete account of the contemporary court reform debate.”
A chapter on term limits — an idea that has received somewhat greater bipartisan support — also described arguments for and against such proposals. But the report also went into more detail on various ways that such a change could be achieved, including how to transition from the current system of life tenure and various challenges for such a change.