President Joe Biden has been shockingly and happily progressive in his first hundred days in office. He has ignored the pearl-clutching of the deficit peacocks and passed a New Deal-style COVID-19 relief bill, and proposed even more ambitious programs to really start tackling income inequality. He’s demonstrated that he’s not going to fall into the inside-the-beltway trap of “bipartisanship,” chasing Republican support for his proposals, but is redefining what that means in light of the massive public support he’s garnered.

There’s one area, though, where the former senator seems to have a blind spot: the Judiciary. Maybe because he is a one-time chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden is bogged down by the tradition of the institution of the federal courts and has less imagination about what could be achieved through court reform. Instead of the kind of bold action we’ve seen from Biden elsewhere, we’ve got the tepid commission he’s appointed to study the problem of Republican-packed courts. In announcing his commission, Biden did acknowledge there’s a problem: “it’s getting out of whack.” What he is lacking, though, is urgency—he’s giving them six months to come up with its analysis of arguments pro and con for reform—and a grasp of the problem partisanship has played in making it “out of whack.”

Rewire News took a close look at some of those commission members, which includes a few staunchly anti-abortion lawyers and Federalist Society members. As if the Federalist Society wasn’t the guiding force behind the Republican court-packing project.

“Given that a driving force over the decades on the right has been overturning Roe v. Wade, I question whether [conservative] individuals who are part of this effort can put aside their beliefs to support much-needed structural reform,” founder and president of the liberal judicial group Alliance for Justice (AFJ) Nan Aron told Rewire News. Natasha Chabria, associate counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, is also less than enthusiastic about what might be forthcoming from this commission. She would hope that the commission would reflect “the values and the needs of the people of this country, the people who voted [Biden] into office,” she said. Chabria also noted that “Reproductive justice is really at its core about bodily autonomy. […] It’s critical to note that it’s not a partisan issue.”

It’s a safe bet that some of the commission members don’t see it that way. “Four of the scholars named to the commission are openly hostile to abortion access or support legal groups or theories that oppose abortion,” Rewire reports. That includes retired D.C. Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith; Adam White, is a law professor at George Mason University; Jack Goldsmith, a former legal counsel to George W. Bush’s White House and Harvard Law professor and a Senior Fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, with ties to the Federalist Society; and Keith Whittington, a Princeton professor and originalism scholar, and a Federalist Society contributor. These are not the men with which you reimagine a 21st century Supreme Court. These are not the men who are going to see a problem with the status quo of a court that it so wildly out of sync with the society it is functioning within.

They’re not going to see the problem of millions of dark money being laundered through the Federalist Society shape a conservative federal judiciary. Not to put too fine a point on it, to pack the courts, especially the Supreme Court, with far-right ideologues bound by corporate interests. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse explained the problem in a National Press Club speech last year.

In short, this is not a commission that is going to be operating in good faith to search out options for court reform, at least not all of its members. Not when they are active participants in what’s essentially been the vast right-wing conspiracy to shape the court for decades. To wit, again from Whitehouse, “through the 2018 term, there are now 80 partisan 5-4 decisions in civil cases that implicate big Republican donor interests—interests like protecting corporations from accountability, undermining public regulatory protections, and helping the Republican Party at the polls. In those 80 cases, those big donor interests won every single time; a staggering 80-0 rout.”

These members of Biden’s commission aren’t going to see any problem with that, at all. That’s a problem for Biden. Because there are more than a few folks at the Federalist Society who are adamantly opposed to Biden being president. Consider that John Eastman, then chairman of the Federalist Society’s Federalism & Separation of Powers practice group, spoke at the pre-insurrection rally on Jan. 6. “Anybody that is not willing to stand up and [vote to overturn the election] does not deserve to be in the office!” Eastman told the crowd. Appearing on stage with Rudy Giuliani at the rally, he reacted approvingly when Rudy incited the crowd with “Let’s have trial by combat!”

Biden’s intentions are certainly good. Even before his inauguration, his transition team was asking Democratic senators for district court nominees “whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench, including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys, and those who represent Americans in every walk of life.” His first round of nominees reflected that.

But the institutionalist in Biden, the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Biden, is holding him back here. He doesn’t seem to recognize that the opposition here is just that—opposition. They’re less concerned with the sanctity of integrity of the federal judiciary than with protecting a status quo that his been very, very good to corporate America. And he’s keeping those foxes on the planning team for rebuilding the henhouse.