The real problem is the lifetime tenure of the justices. The Founders did that for good reason, to insulate the Court from the immediate politics of the time. But people are simply living longer now, and Republicans figured out how to ratfuck the Court to stack it in their favor. (Helped in no small part by RBG, who could not be convinced to retire at the right time). Openings on the Court are so rare that it is worth expending significant political effort to get them to go your way.
If Democrats ever get control of the Presidency and Congress again, they should immediately move to blow up the Court to 13 members. They can do it by immediately turning it up to 11, and then making it 13 two years later, in order to stagger the changes. But this is important enough that they should blow up the filibuster to do it.
(13 is a magic number because it matches the number of Federal district courts.)
And then, after the bill is passed, they should work with Republicans on a framework to add term limits to the Constitution. Each of the 13 justices gets a 13 year term, each justice could serve up to two terms, consecutive or not, and would have to be re-appointed and re-confirmed for their second term. They can even tie the number of justices directly to the number of Federal circuits, so that it is harder to ratfuck on the future. 26 years is long enough to insulate a justice from politics. And out of our 116 justices to date, only 28 have served more than 26 years.
But by giving every President the right to nominate one justice per year, it makes the process more regular, and the political payoff for engineering a single appointment becomes less attractive. Supreme Court turnover becomes a predictable thing.
At this point, Republicans may be willing to support that amendment, because the alternative would be for President Newsom to appoint 4 Liberals to the court for Life in quick succession, and wait for their own full control to ratfuck it again. That might take a while.
It’s so adorable that you think Democrats might ever actually do anything if they got power. Enjoy your cookie.
A boy can dream, can’t he?
they should work with Republicans
Have…have you not been paying attention?
Republicans want power. They don’t care how they get it. They will negotiate in bad faith to get it.
That’s why you need to add 4 young, Liberal justices in thir 40s (who would serve for 40+ years with a lifetime appointment) before starting to work with Republicans. Make it so that the alternative to not working together is much worse for them.
You must have missed it, but Harris spent her valuable time mostly courting Republicans for a reason. Not Ds (millions sat this one out), not independents, but Rs.
Why would she does this, when we all know she had to court independents to win? It’s a mathematical necessity.
Do you know why? I wonder if there’s any connection to the billion dollars she raised (at least)? Hmmmm, it’s a mystery.
You do not need a constitutional amendment. Until 1911; part of a Supreme Court Justice’s job was “riding circuit”, to serve on more local circuit courts. This practice was established and abolished by Congress. Congress has the existing constitutional authority to assign Justices to circuit courts.
There is also a recently proposed TERM act, which would promote Justices to senior Justices after 18 years. A senior Justice is still a Justice, but would not actively decide cases unless there was a shortage of active Justices.
Congress could also impeach some of the current Justices. Either for partisan political reasons; perjury at their confirmation; or blatant corruption.
Each of the 13 justices gets a 13 year term, each justice could serve up to two terms, consecutive or not,
Absolutely not. You NEED it to be one term, because judges should never have to rely on approval of others for their jobs. The only reason they should be able to be removed after appointment is a severe ethics violation.
The real problem is Democrats giving rubber-stamp confirmations to conservative Supreme Court justices.
Well said, and great idea.
Removed by mod
Good luck when 35% of the country holds the rest of us hostage.
I agree almost entirely with what youre saying but let’s not pretend like RGB not stopping down would have mattered. Republicans had already shown that they were willing to just leave the seat vacant for a year unless it was their guy nominating.
RGB should have stepped down early in Obama’s second term, when Democrats still held a majority in the Senate…
I think we should have age limits on any political position, including that of judges. 70 is about the limit where physical and mental acuity is pretty likely to be slipping away, but having the energies to struggle through confrontations is the basis of being a judge. Character is important, but that means nothing if the judge in question becomes a Merrick Garland.
So both term and age limits, to help prevent the stratification of power and politics.
A democracy shouldn’t have a single person in power who wasn’t elected.
The United States needs to discard the “republic” part of our democratic republic.
- no more electoral college
- no SCOTUS
- no appointments for positions of power
- no private political donations
And in order for these changes to happen, rich men in positions of power will need to die.
I feel like if a corrupt executive and legislative branch can get elected, having an elected judicial branch doesn’t exactly fix anything.
I kind of agree with that
Really we should have a direct democracy
Aren’t judges appointed in almost all countries outside of the US, Mexico and Switzerland.
But appointments can work if the system is respected by all. Elections just mean pure unadulterated politics.
My country (Australia) our Supreme Court is called the High Court. The national judicial body shortlists a selection of suitably qualified and respected candidates when there is a vacancy. The candidates owe no political affiliation to any party. The government selects a candidate, usually the recommended judge. There is rarely any controversy in the selection as the politicians, the judges, and the people respect the system.
Australia sometimes gets an upset challenge to a government decision, but everyone tends to blame a government for overreach rather than corruption on the part of the High Court.
This is all appointment with no elections involved. In the US you have elections for positions that we never have, and you introduce politics and dirty money where it’s not needed. If the system is fucked no amount of empty democracy is going to save it. We even have a appointed commission to draw independent electoral boundaries in this country. Gerrymandering isn’t a thing anymore, anywhere in the country. Politicians and parties get to make a submission on what the boundaries might look like, but anything dodgy gets thrown out. The people have confidence in the commission and no controversy.
too many people to vote for means no one knows anything about who they’re voting for.
I think some appointments are fine, but they should never be soley appoint able by 1 branch/person. I3, congress should be able to put forth their own cabinet options type of thing
…of natural causes so that their entrenched power can be passed on to future generations.
One author is in the federalist society (the reason SC is corrupt)…
And the other seems to believe international laws shouldn’t exist and Israel is totally cool…
They want us to “accept” it’s corrupt and somehow do away with the entire notion of a SC and replace it with some “populist rule”.
Similarly, progressives are increasingly converging on the idea of both expanding and “disempowering” federal courts. Attentive to the reality that the supreme court especially is not and rarely has been their friend, left-leaning advocates are finding ways to empower ordinary people, trading the hollow hope of judicial power for the promise of popular rule.
To label as “nihilists” those sketching an alternate, more democratic future is, in other words, not only mistaken but outright bizarre. Rather than adhere to the same institutionalist strategies that helped our current crisis, reformers must insist on remaking institutions like the US supreme court so that Americans don’t have to suffer future decades of oligarchy-facilitating rule that makes a parody of the democracy they were promised.
In Trump’s second term, the Republican-appointed majority on the supreme court has brought their institution to the brink of illegitimacy. Far from pulling it back from the edge, our goal has to be to push it off.
They’re right wingers trying to hijack progressivism to destroy the SC after it changes all the laws to how they want, and before the left can use it as a weapon to change the laws back.
I’d love to say people won’t be naive enough to fall for this, but I don’t want to lie
I think this is a misread of the article. They don’t seem to be suggesting any actual solution, and only mention “populist rule” in passing with no specifics.
But they do seem to be blaming the left for not doing anything about the problem. And I thought it was funny how at the top they were like “even liberals like Roberts”
Only six of them deserve to be replaced, but they should also spend the rest of their lives in prison.
Clean it all out and start over again.
All of them ruled against an ethics framework. All can go. The Republicans need to be in prison, the democrats need disbarred.
Did you even read the article?
The time was a decade ago.
term limits is a start
The United States needs a completely new constitutional process, to stop idolizing as political gurus people who lived 300 years ago and did a great job for their time, but that’s over. In Europe, some countries, during that same period, had dozens of constitutions and nothing bad happened about it.
Oh no, our Conservatives have been prepping for a new Constitutional Convention, and already have a playbook planned to ratfuck that.
The process for that is that 2/3 of states need to call for a constitutional convention to start it. When in session, everything is fair game to be amended. The rules for that are not codified in advance and created by the members themselves. And whatever comes out of that must be approved by 3/4 of the states (currently 38) in order to be binding on everyone.
But , by my calculations, 182 million people live in the 12 most populous states. Since the US population in all states is 339 million, that means that a new constitution can be ratified by states with only 43% of the population, then bind everyone to it.
There is no doubt in my mind that this will result in those states who did not vote for the new constitution seceding.
Either I haven’t explained myself well, or you haven’t understood me. I’m not talking about following any set path; I’m talking about throwing everything out the window and starting from scratch.
It is clear that establishing rules that apply in California and Texas requires consensus and compromise, but even federalism needs to be rethought, if you start from where you are today, you’ll never get very far.
At the first continental congress, or whatever it was called, there were no rules to go on. You’d have to go back there.
SCOTUS is flawed because it IS beholden to the other branches.
What I mean is, the President picks the nominee and Congress approves them. Every other branch is selected by the people.
It gives the other branches too much power over the judicial branch. It harms checks and balances.
It’s far worse than that. The judiciary is able to be fired by the executive branch and that simply should not be possible.
I feel the checks on the supreme court is close. I think with 18 year ish terms to replace 1 every every 2 years consistently would work
The judiciary is able to be fired by the executive branch
No it isn’t. Federal judges serve for life. They can’t be removed by the President
I think that the recent case put to them that Trump has the power to sack formally independent institutional heads may be an answer. It certainly put Federal judges on notice. Not addressed directly, but once Trump sacks a Federal judge under that rulling the legal consequences for SCOTUS may be startling. He, or the next president may dump any or all of the Supremes that they don’t like?
Caveat: not a lawyer, or even close to being one. Just a long-time interested observer.
18 is probably correct number. Its the shortest even-numbered term that doesn’t allow a normal 2-term president to replace half the court. If you want to count the extreme case of a 10-year president due to a VeeP taking over then getting elected twice, it should be 20 years with terms starting on like January 10.
Unfortunately, there’s no process for that. Single judges can be removed via impeachment, but being a partisan hack is not a high crime.
Similarly, nothing can happen with Conservatives controlling the House and Senate.
Oh, they know…
https://fedsoc.org/bio/ryan-doerfler
They want to trick people into dissolving the SC before the left gains control and can replace the problematic ones while taking steps to prevent this from happening again.
It’s like a kid that walks up and slaps a peer, then immediately says “no tag backs” and says the game is over…
The federalist society got what it wants out of the SC, and now they want people to stop abusing it before we can undo what they just did.
I don’t know why googling authors isn’t the norm when billionaires own all the media companies. If you don’t you’ll never notice clear hypocrites like Ryan Doerfler.
Alas, the Constitution does little to protect against incompetent voters who refuse to act to protect their democracy.
It’s not incompetence, that would imply people tried to prevent this. It’s apathy. If “did not vote” had been a candidate:
A core problem is that impeachment votes have become a team popularity contest, with the details of charges, innocence, guilt, etc. being irrelevant except for theatrics.
The US political system is antidemocratic (Madison) and should be replaced.
People don’t want to hear this. They want to blame the marginal voter for not supporting their compromise candidate.
Oh yeah the only way to fix the broken two party system is to vote for the great team Btm and not that terrible team Atm. Gotta make sure there is never any other options then team Atm or Btm after all.
Oh and when it all goes wrong (now) make sure to blame voters without choice and also state how nothing can be done as the usa is somehow special and what works everywhere else could never work there.
Gotta make sure there is never any other options then team Atm or Btm after all.
The best part is when you do all the work to win the seat for B and they change parties to A right after the election (Jim Justice down in WV being a great example).
There’s a bunch of speculation that Cuellar got his Appropriations seat back to keep him from flipping to R after the Trump pardon. The parties were in a bidding war for one of the most corrupt mother fuckers of the 21st century
And this is who we’re choosing between
Ah yes, the american “we” that both somehow includes everyone in the world but at the same time excludes them at the same time.
If you are not an american, can’t have an opinion on the american system (not that that stops americans from thinking they have the same ability outside of the us). Everyone is also an american to every american until proved otherwise, and most americans think the whole world works like america. The american system is broken but according to americans nothingtm can be done about it so get out and vote for the home team.
Hey maybe if americans took a page from Nepal things would be different, but those sorts of things can’t happen in america since for some unknown and indescribable reason they are special and unique.
Hey maybe if americans took a page from Nepal things would be different
A non-white country? Perish the thought.
The entire friggin government needs to be replaced.
Difficult to argue against but impossible to actually change.
George Conway had an interesting “fix” that gets around the constitutional obstacles where older justices are relegated to something like emeritus positions and new justices are appointed to the main bench to take their place
We accepted that a long time ago, in the before-fore.
Way past time but ok.
The time was
yesterdaylast yearlast decadebut I guess we can do it now of everyone is up for it.
No shit.
