Biden pitches biggest Supreme Court changes in 150 years. Could it actually happen?

President Joe Biden is calling for sweeping changes to the Supreme Court to restore trust and accountability amid a series of ethics scandals and unpopular rulings – but it’sunlikely those reforms will see the light of day.

On Monday, the president officially endorsed three major changes to the Supreme Court: enacting a new system in which a president appoints a justice every two years to serve for 18 years, implementing a binding code of ethics and adding a constitutional amendment to strip presidents of criminal immunity.

It arrives as the court is experiencing record-low approval ratings.

“What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms,” Biden wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

But the president’s bold proposal is likely to face an uphill battle – one that hasn’t been summited since 1869.

There is nothing in the Constitution that indicates the Supreme Court must have a certain number of justices or hold office for life. Instead, the Constitution says justices, “shall hold their offices during good behavior,”

Only Congress has the power to change the structure of the court, including how many justices serve and for how long, by passing legislation. To do so requires congressional approval in both chambers, which is unlikely given Republicans control the House.

The last major change to the Supreme Court was more than 150 years ago, when Congress passed an act formally adopting nine seats. Since then, multiple lawmakers, including former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, have tried but failed to reform the court. In recent years, Democrats have pushed to add seats after conservative justices became the