Harris and the Supreme Court

When President Joe Biden announced his “plan” to reform the Supreme Court (two paragraphs in a news release is only generously called a “plan”), Vice President Kamala Harris immediately jumped on board with her full support, saying the Biden proposals “will help to restore confidence in the court, strengthen our democracy, and ensure no one is above the law.” Sadly, her immediate endorsement of the president’s one-sided scheme to pack the court is par for the course for Harris, who has been a consistent advocate for far-left priorities on legal issues.

Harris is a lawyer (University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, class of 1989) who served as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general before her rocketlike rise to U.S. senator, vice president, and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. This legal background gave her a particular profile on legal issues in the Senate and in the Biden administration.

While in the Senate, she served on the Judiciary Committee, where she grilled all of President Donald Trump’s nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. For instance, Al-Jazeera reports that Harris’ questioning of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 “helped solidify her credentials as one of the Democratic Party’s top rising stars.” During one exchange, she asked Kavanaugh for an example of a law giving the government power to make decisions about the male body rather than the female—apparently ignoring the Selective Service System. When it was Amy Coney Barrett’s turn before the Senate two years later, Democrats salivated over a repeat performance from their “star prosecutor” on the committee. Harris had at least one “heated exchange” on voting discrimination, but on the whole, turned in a more “measured performance” than her interrogation of Kavanaugh. In the end, she voted against the confirmation of all three Trump nominees: Neil Gorsuch (2017), Kavanaugh, and Barrett (three Democrat senators voted in support of Gorsuch, one voted for Kavanaugh, and none voted for Barrett).

Since the three joined the court, Harris has been a consistent critic of their decisions, often serving as the Biden administration’s go-to spokeswoman on judicial issues. Unsurprisingly, this starts with her strong disagreement with the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. She told NBC News afterward, “We had an established right for almost half a century, which is the right of women to make decisions about their own body as an extension of what we have decided to be, the privacy rights to which all people are entitled. And this court took that constitutional right away, and we are suffering as a nation because of it.” The decision, she said, caused her “great concern about the integrity of the court overall.”

That has become an ongoing theme for Harris since Dobbs, who would use that decision as the starting point for a broader critique of an “activist court.” More recently, for instance, Harris criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright, which ended judicial deference to administrative agencies, as taking the side of “powerful special interests who want to roll back commonsense rules that protect Americans.” These and other decisions led Harris to say recently that “there is a clear crisis of confidence facing the Supreme Court as its fairness has been called into question after numerous ethics scandals and decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent.” Elsewhere, she’s forecast further victories for conservatives, such that she fears “for our fundamental freedoms.”

The question on the minds of liberals now is whether Harris will actually do something about the court if she wins the presidency. Her hiring of Brian Fallon for a senior campaign position was a sign that she plans to champion packing the court, as that is his signature issue. And in a 2019 interview while a senator, she said, “Everything is on the table” for Supreme Court reform, including adding justices to the bench.

For social conservatives, judicial appointments have always occupied a central place in our agenda. The contrast between the two candidates, Trump and Harris, could not be clearer. Trump appointed Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, three consistent champions for the rule of law and an appropriate jurisprudential approach. Harris voted against all three and has now promised to support legislation that would pack the court with a new generation of liberal justices. The choice could not be clearer on this critical issue.