It was slated to provide a nonpartisan analysis of "the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform".

In 2016, Republicans had invoked the informal and seldom-used Thurmond rule to block the nomination of Merrick Garland, based on its proximity to a presidential election.

[5] During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Pete Buttigieg proposed that the size of the Supreme Court be increased to 15, in order to reduce the significance of partisanship.

[9] An editorial of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the commission's membership "tilts sharply to the legal and political left",[10] and the libertarian Cato Institute estimated the ratio of progressives to conservatives as 3:1.

[11] However, an article in Vox described the membership as a "win for the [conservative] Federalist Society", saying that "while the author of one of the most significant attacks on Obamacare in the last decade [Thomas B. Griffith] is on Biden’s commission, none of the leading academic proponents of Supreme Court reform were appointed".

These leading academic proponents included Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman, who had authored Pete Buttigieg's proposal to expand the Supreme Court, and who were not invited to the commission.