Sen.Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., called out the Biden administration on Wednesday for a lack of action taken on the Supreme Court and said they were "completely chicken" on it.The Lever's David Sirota asked Whitehouse about what "legitimate" resistance to the court might look like if a Democratic president believed the Supreme Court was "enabling an anti-democratic project.""Well, I think it starts with truth telling and I think the chief executive of the United States has the proverbial bully, the bulliest of all pulpits, and should be prepared to make the argument about what has gone wrong with the courts.
The Biden administration was highly reluctant to do that.They completely chickened out.
Biden set up that lame committee commission on the Supreme Court and then squelched both Judge Gertner and Professor Tribe when they wanted to describe some of the actual problems at the court so that they couldn't even get that into the report," Whitehouse said.LIBERAL JUSTICE HAMMERS SUPREME COURT FOR FAST-TRACKING EMERGENCY DOCKET CASESHe continued, "The Biden people didn't want to go there.They were completely chicken about all that.
They wanted no part of that.And it — really wasn't until the very end, in his last speech after he and Harris had both lost that Biden seemed to have at least somewhat awakened to the fact that the Supreme Court had a real integrity problem."Sen.
Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said the Biden administration chickened out on Supreme Court reform during an interview on The Lever on Oct.14, 2026.
(Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images; Sean Rayford/Getty Images)FLASHBACK: DEM SENATOR EMBROILED IN CONFLICT OF INTEREST ROW TARGETED SCOTUS IN ETHICS CRUSADENancy Gertner and Laurence Tribe served on former President Biden's Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court.Gertner and Tribe wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post in December 2021, calling for adding more justices to the court after the commission ultimately took no position on adding more justic...