by Jorge Gomez • 4 minutes
President Biden’s court “reform” scheme is a threat to America. His proposed changes to the U.S. Supreme Court will destroy the rule of law and our constitutional system. The Supreme Court will cease to be a safeguard of our civil liberties. Instead, our judicial system will be little more than a political tool used to crush the freedom of Americans.
Nations that implemented similar judicial “reforms” quickly descended into tyranny. Venezuela serves as a sobering reminder.
Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999. It only took about five years for him to pack his nation’s highest court, The Supreme Tribunal of Justice. In 2004, Chavez’s allies in the Venezuela’s National Assembly passed a law that increased the number of judges on the Supreme Tribunal from 20 members to 32. Those seats were quickly filled with Chavez loyalists.
In Venezuela, Supreme Tribunal justices can only serve for a single 12-year term—a structure resembling the 18-year term limit Biden wants to impose on U.S. Supreme Court Justices.
Hyper-partisan fixing of the Court has wreaked havoc on Venezuela’s constitutional system over the past 20 years. Court “reform” turned the judiciary into a political puppet of the ruling party. Some reports claim that of the 45,000 rulings issued between 2004 and 2014, the Venezuela high court never delivered a ruling against the Chavez regime. Not once.
In 2015, opponents of President Nicolas Maduro (Chavez’s hand-picked successor) “won” a majority of congressional seats. But pro-Maduro members of the lame-duck congress rammed through 13 new Supreme Court justices who favored Maduro’s regime retaining power. That was in addition to the 16 pro-Maduro judges appointed just the year before. In 2017, the Venezuela Supreme Court issued a ruling that stripped away the country’s national assembly of its powers, allowing the magistrates to assume legislative duties.
🚨The 1st thing socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro did in #Venezuela was “reform”the country’s Supreme Court to undermine democracy & remain in power!
As Members of Congress, representing our community of exiles, we REJECT Biden’s call to “reform” the Supreme Court! pic.twitter.com/Zs4YWgpHEY
— Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez (@RepCarlos) July 29, 2024
In 2020, the stacked Court named a new National Electoral Council—the agency responsible for conducting elections in the country—filled with loyalists of the Maduro regime. In exercising this power, the Court undermined one of the most fundamental aspects of a true representative democracy: free and fair elections.
Tainted elections still plague the country today. Maduro declared himself the winner of the recent July 2024 elections, although voting tallies overwhelmingly suggest his opponents won. Maduro requested that Venezuela’s high court take over auditing of the voting data from the electoral board.
But no one expects a transparent, impartial ruling from the Court. As TIME reports, “Venezuela’s top judicial body has for years been controlled by regime loyalists who have issued favorable decisions on issues from expropriations by the state to the banning of opposition political candidates.”
With a Supreme Court stacked in its favor, the regime has been given free rein to put in place laws intruding into the religious liberty of Venezuelans. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reported that national laws were passed to “allow for the creation of ruling-party-dominated ‘communal councils’ to oversee the curriculum, teachers, and school administrators of all public and private schools, including religious schools, as well as the confiscation of Catholic Church property, including churches, schools, and other ecclesiastical buildings.”
Some religious groups in Venezuela must even “obtain advanced government approval of their activities and funding sources and provide the government with information on their sources of funding, organizational leadership, and activities,” USCIRF noted.
Free speech and freedom of the press also deteriorated. According to Human Rights Watch:
“For more than a decade, the government has expanded and abused its power to regulate media and has worked aggressively to reduce the number of dissenting media outlets. The government can suspend or revoke concessions to private media if ‘convenient for the interests of the nation,’ arbitrarily suspend websites for the vaguely defined offense of ‘incitement,’ and criminalize expression of ‘disrespect’ for high government officials.”
Venezuela’s experiment with court “reform” turned the country’s Constitution upside down. Without an independent judiciary, this once prosperous and free nation quickly saw a decline in political, civil, economic and religious liberties. This is a warning for Americans.
President Biden didn’t call to expand the size of the Supreme Court in his most recent plan. But don’t be deceived. Ending life tenure for Supreme Court justices is simply court-packing by a different name.
This plan is all about purging America’s highest court of justices who rule in accordance with the Constitution. 18-year terms would immediately remove the longest-serving and most conservative justices first. This proposal is an act of pure political revenge designed to force out Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to make room for those favored by the party in power.
At the end of the day, this is all about the far Left, radical groups and some politicians who want to rig the court in their favor. Like what happened in Venezuela, this is a brazen power grab.
Whether it’s court-packing or ending lifetime tenure for federal judges (court purging), or giving Congress “oversight” of the Court’s internal business, all of these proposals would be catastrophic. This radical Supreme Court Coup would be the gateway to tyranny in our country.
Read More:
Newsweek: Joe Biden’s Supreme Court Plan Compared to Maduro’s Venezuela
The New York Times: Biden’s Plan to Overhaul the Supreme Court and Venezuela’s Tainted Election
The Hill: Biden’s plan to Venezuela-ize the US Supreme Court
Fox News: When court packing goes wrong: Venezuela and other Latin American countries offer sobering reality
The National Interest: Venezuela Tried Court Packing. It Went Really Bad.
Bloomberg: Venezuela Appoints New High Court Packed With Government Allies
“I believe the American people will reject the politicization of our judiciary,” President Ronald Reagan once said. “When the people begin to hear the truth, they will demand an independent judiciary, free from high pressure politics and founded on the principle of judicial restraint.”
500,000+ Americans have already signed the Declaration of Judicial Independence saying: NO to court packing, NO to suspect judicial reforms, NO to the Supreme Court Coup.
Help us spread the truth! Americans who care about their freedoms need to speak up and stand up against this attempted coup. Forward this information to your family, friends, neighbors and coworkers. More Americans need to know the threat this scheme poses. We need to work together to help save the priceless heritage of the U.S. Supreme Court.
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