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?
We have two pro capitalist parties in the US.
What’s interesting is that during the great depression they knew that economic collapse would lead to a socialist revolution, and so put in the work to “inoculate” the US against it. They would give us a little socialism, so that we wouldn’t go all in. Medicare, social security, minimum wage, all these things came out of that philosophy. And it fucking worked. The US had the single most robust economy in human history from the 40s all the way through to the 1970s. When, in response to the civil rights movement, white southerners actively voted against their own self interest KNOWINGLY, so that black people wouldn’t get a fair share of the pie. Nixon began the week to work to dismantle the New Deal, and we’re basically living with the shattered broken corpse of the best social program we were ever going to get with votes.
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.
The real problem is Democrats giving rubber-stamp confirmations to conservative Supreme Court justices.
Removed by mod
Well said, and great idea.
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.
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”
The time was a decade ago.
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.
Did you even read the article?
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
Way past time but ok.
The time was
yesterdaylast yearlast decadebut I guess we can do it now of everyone is up for it.
The whole US Constitution 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.
We accepted that a long time ago, in the before-fore.
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.
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 entire friggin government needs to be replaced.
No shit.
It’s not a nuice we need. It’s a guillotine. We need their blood splatter to wash away the shit these people have put out.
Why the fuck didn’t they pack the court with 11 justices when they had the chance?
Democratic congresspersons confirmed most of the conservative Supreme Court justices. Biden was famously instrumental in getting Clarence Thomas confirmed.
Amazing that putting pubic hair in your coworkers coffee is not a career killing move.
I guess, unlike Kavanaugh, to my knowledge Thomas has never raped anyone.
