Biden should call SCOTUS in State of the Union: Former Clinton speechwriter

President Joe Biden has been urged by a former White House speechwriter to call the Supreme Court during his upcoming State of the Union address.

The president is due to deliver his second State of the Union during a joint session of Congress on Tuesday evening. In a series of tweets on Monday, former President Bill Clinton’s ex-speechwriter Michael Waldman urged Biden to break with tradition and push back against the recent “radical” court reversal of Roe vs. Wade and other socially conservative decisions.

“Tomorrow, @POTUS will deliver the State of the Union, a traditionally silent address on the subject of the Supreme Court,” Waldman said. tweeted. “But Biden should break that habit this year. The Supreme Court has become too radical and too dangerous to ignore.”

“Last summer, the Supreme Court – dominated by a supermajority of six conservative justices – crammed decades of conservative social policy into the final three days of its term, with more likely this spring,” he added. . “Biden should not sit idly by.”

Waldman served on Biden’s presidential committee on the Supreme Court in 2021. He is currently president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, his alma mater.

As he worked to craft four different State of the Union addresses for Clinton, Waldman said he could not “remember ever considering a mention of the Court.”

However, he urged Biden to declare the Supreme Court “a threat to American democracy” during his speech because “it’s a different time”, pointing out that “the value of half a century of constitutional protections for the rights reproductive” had been overturned with the court’s decision to set aside deer.

He also criticized the High Court for ‘drastically relaxing gun laws amid an epidemic of violence’ and diminishing the power of the Environmental Protection Agency in ‘its determination to ignore the climate crisis”.

“All this happened last year”, tweeted Walman. “And now judges are deliberating on cases of similar importance. The next wave of rulings will likely overturn Affirmative Action in College Admissions, a social policy decision with massive implications.”

Waldman noted that Biden would not be “the first president to take the opportunity to speak out against the court” if he chooses to do so, pointing out that former presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama have all criticized the courtyard.

“In this speech, Biden should attack the extreme ‘originalism’ used by the Court to justify its decisions,” he tweeted. “He should call for term limits for judges, popular with both conservatives and progressives, and a binding code of ethics…As always, the judges will be front and center during the speech.”

Newsweek contacted the White House for comment.