Biden Campaign Ad Personally Attacks Supreme Court Justices

The Biden campaign released an ad last week that personally attacks Supreme Court justices for being beholden to former President Donald Trump.

The ad takes particular aim at the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling earlier this month that a U.S. president cannot be prosecuted for acts that were within his constitutional powers as president.

“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 Biden ad’s narrator says.

The spot refers to the high court as the “Trump Supreme Court” and implies that the justices ignored the law and ruled as Trump wanted them to.

“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 ad’s 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.”

President Joe Biden, 81, has frequently attacked the Supreme Court with its 6-3 conservative majority, especially as the campaign season has heated up.

“I dissent,” Biden said Monday evening in response, referring to the court’s decision on presidential immunity.

Biden has also been particularly focused on the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, claiming the Dobbs decision overturned a constitutional right for the first time in the history of the court.

Biden’s attacks on the court are unprecedented, experts say.

Legal scholar Jonathan Turley said the idea that Biden is “really the symbol of constitutional fealty is really alarming.”

Attorney Mark Paoletta, a personal friend of Justice Clarence Thomas who played a significant role in his confirmation, called the attacks on the court “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.

In 2010, then-President Barack Obama lashed out at the court’s decision in the Citizens United case, which allowed corporations and other groups to spend independently on political campaigns.

The court “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 said during his State of the Union speech that year.

Republicans at the time criticized Obama’s willingness to attack the court.