The Supreme Court is caught in a crisis of its own making.

There is the gross corruption of Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, who have received millions of dollars in gifts and benefits from various billionaire benefactors.

There is the court’s open assault on the basic rights of tens of millions of Americans, exemplified in its decision to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion on the basis of a vague and inconsistent standard of “text, history and tradition.”

And there is the hubris of Chief Justice Roberts, who, the legal scholar Eric J. Segall writes, has “led the court to coerce both state and federal governments to abide by his personal preferences, whether or not positive legal sources supported those decisions and at times even when prior law quite clearly did not justify the chief’s opinions and votes.”

It is a testament to Roberts’s skill as a politician that he is often viewed as a modest and moderate judicial institutionalist when, in fact, he has used his position on the court to spearhead a remarkable campaign of judicial activism. In cases like Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 and the more recent West Virginia v. E.P.A., Roberts all but deployed novel constitutional doctrines (“equal state sovereignty” and the “major questions doctrine”) to achieve his preferred results. In just the last term, the Roberts court has rewritten the 14th Amendment to keep Donald Trump on the presidential ballot as well as radically expanded presidential power in direct contravention of the history, text and structure of the Constitution.

We have, in other words, a corrupt and lawless court that, led by its conservative majority, has put itself above the constitutional system as the exclusive arbiter of constitutional meaning. The Constitution means whatever the Roberts court says it means, even when that meaning conflicts with the basic principles of American democracy.

It is against this backdrop of institutional dysfunction and judicial arrogance that President Biden, fresh from his decision to leave the campaign trail in favor of his vice president, introduced his three-point package of Supreme Court reforms.