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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
  • dhork@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•It’s time to accept that the US supreme court is illegitimate and must be replaced | Ryan Doerfler and Samuel MoynEnglish
    3·
    4 hours ago

    “illegitimate” is different than “illegal”. In some context they are the same, but “illegitimate” can also mean “against rules” or “against custom”.

    The President nominates these officials, but they take office “with the advice and consent of the Senate”. I take that to mean that after the President consults with the Senate, he makes an appointment, and the Senate is obligated to give an up-or-down vote on it.

    I remember that time well, and Merrick Garland (yes, that guy) was the compromise candidate that Obama picked because he had the respect, of a lot of Republican Senators. The Senate had a constitutional duty to put it to an up or down vote, which Mitch ignored, because he would not like the outcome. (If Garland didn’t have any Republican support, after all, they could have just held the vote, and voted it down. But that would have given Obama another chance to nominate someone else.)

    There is no law that says “the Senate must act within this period of time”. We can’t haul McConnell to the brig because of it. Yet, it is clear to me that he flat out ignorea something the Constitution obligated him to do. It can be clearly seen as illegitimate, especially when he changed those rules a few years later.

  • dhork@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•It’s time to accept that the US supreme court is illegitimate and must be replaced | Ryan Doerfler and Samuel MoynEnglish
    361·
    7 hours ago

    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.