Last Monday, the Biden campaign produced an advertisement in which it criticizes the justices of the Supreme Court directly for their loyalty to former President Donald Trump.
The commercial specifically targets the Supreme Court’s historic decision earlier this month, which held that a president of the United States cannot be held accountable for actions that fell within the scope of his constitutional authority.
“Nearly 250 years ago, America was founded in defiance of a king under the belief that no one is above the law, not even the president — until now,” the ad’s narrator says.
The advertisement calls the Supreme Court the “Trump Supreme Court” and suggests that the justices disregarded the law and rendered decisions that suited Trump.
“The same Trump Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade ruled that the president can ignore the law even to commit a crime because Donald Trump asked them to,” the narrator says. “He’s already led an insurrection and threatened to be a dictator on day one. Donald Trump can never hold this office again.”
Particularly during the heated campaign season, President Joe Biden, 81, has regularly criticized the Supreme Court and its 6-3 conservative majority.
In response, Biden stated on Monday night, “I dissent,” citing the court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
Biden has also paid close attention to the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling to reverse Roe v. Wade, stating that the Dobbs decision was the first in the court’s history to invalidate a constitutional right.
Experts claim that Biden’s attacks on the court are unusual.
The notion that Biden is “really the symbol of constitutional fealty is really alarming,” said to legal scholar Jonathan Turley.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s personal friend and confidant, Mark Paoletta, who was instrumental in his confirmation, described the court’s attacks as “dangerous.”
“Obama criticized a single case in his State of the Union, which is bad enough, but Biden does a nationwide primetime address to trash the court on immunity… though he did not have the courage or perhaps the mental acuity to take any questions,” Paoletta said.
The court’s ruling in the Citizens United case, which permitted corporations and other organizations to independently fund political campaigns, infuriated then-President Barack Obama in 2010.
In his State of the Union address that year, Obama stated that the court had “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”
Obama’s readiness to take aim at the court was condemned by Republicans at the time.
