Obvious check #1: Congress gets its sh*t together, and stops writing endless vague blather into law.
Obvious check #2: Congress enlarges the Supreme Count to 21 Justices. And lets the President know that his nominees for the 12 new positions will need to understand who's the real boss.
Why stop at 21, why not get 1 supreme court from each state? You could get 2 if you wanted to be spicy and setup a sort of room for them all to debate in. Then after they heard the debates they could vote on the matter and if it passes it gets written into law. A sort of congress...
Increasing the size of the court isn’t a slippery slope to somehow making justices elected by states/districts. It’s not like as soon as you get too many justices it turns into a legislature.
The interesting differences between the legislative and judicial branch is not the number of people (moreover, the Supreme Court is not exactly the entirety of the federal judicial branch).
I was thinking "enough to routinely overrule the current 9 Justices".
Representing individual states, as such, is supposed to be the job of Congressmen. And - with how low-functioning Congress is looking, these days, patterning anything new after them is probably a bad idea.
So Congress is dysfunctional. The Supreme Court is semi-functional, but functioning in a way that you don't like. So you want Congress to vote in a bunch of new people to fix the Supreme Court. Why do you think that will work, instead of be ruined by the usual Congressional dysfunction?
And, if the party in power adds enough Supreme Court justices to routinely overturn the current 9, what makes you think that when the other side is in power, they won't add enough to overturn your 12?
The Supreme Court is not supposed to bend with the wind of every political election. It's by design.
Particularly given McConnell's... Interpretations... Of how his obligated duties were fulfilled in regards to the timeliness of actions taken to ensure that such seats were filled.
Are you asking if it did bend to the right? You’re asking if an additional conservative vote shift in a hairline composition shifted the balance? Would you be asking the same if it was a 6-3 liberal majority?
This courts been in power for 8 years and has overturned 3 major ways that the government operates:
1. Roe v Wade overturned so that the government is back in charge of reproductive rights decisions instead of leaving it as a deeply personal decision for a family to make on their own. There’s pretty clearly a lack of any evidence that late term abortions are a cavalier thing. When it gets that late it’s not a change of mind thing 99.999% of the time.
2. Brady and similar decisions basically removing congress’ and states’ abilities to regulate guns
3. Chevron doctrine overturned so unless congress writes impossible laws the courts get to arbitrarily define ambiguities even though it was delegated to the executive to create justifiable well researched exposition of those ambiguities.
Basically, this court has already delivered 3 major decisions shifting American politics in pretty drastic ways in the 8 years. This is certainly not a liberal or status quo court.
And the court itself has serious perception issues of accepting gifts and bribes (and significantly reducing the definition of what counts as corruption in the first place, which is well outside their mandate considering these are actually laws congress passed). They’re badly in need of cultural reform as is congress and in both scenarios adjusting the number of representatives and the number of justices is called for to relieve the pressure that’s been building.
Don’t forget that they legalized bribery as well. Just so long as the payment is made after the fact it’s considered a “gratuity”. This court is making drastic long reaches changed and overthrowing precedent whenever convenient.
> The high court’s 6-3 opinion along ideological lines found the law criminalizes bribes given before an official act, not rewards handed out after.
> “Some gratuities can be problematic. Others are commonplace and might be innocuous,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote. The lines aren’t always clear, especially since many state and local officials have other jobs, he said.
> The high court sided with James Snyder, a Republican who was convicted of taking $13,000 from a trucking company after prosecutors said he steered about $1 million worth of city contracts to the company.
Roe v Wade and gun control are pretty classical cultural war stuff from the 60s and 70s. I’m not sure where you’re getting it but the left being pro choice and the right being pro life are classical left/right distinctions in America since at least Roe v Wade or shortly thereafter. Similarly, gun control also became a classical left/right distinction once the left decided that gun ownership was a public safety problem and the right decided that personal gun ownership is enshrined in the Constitution.
Can you clarify how these aren’t left/right distinctions?
it removed restrictions on abortion, allowing local parties to decide for themselves, it seems constitutional but not partisan, RvW was also an abortion ban don’t forget
By what reasoning is RvW an abortion ban? It was a ban on abortion bans but that’s very different. The only restrictions Dobbs removed were those impeding bans. If you listened to the debate, Trump said pretty clearly he’s against late term abortions and if the right takes power next year a federal ban superseding local parties seems inevitable. So you have to jump through a lot of mental hoops to pretend like Dobbs was anything other than a step on the road to a full federal ban on abortions (first it’ll start at something like 16-24 weeks and gradually be shifted earlier and earlier and you’ll claim “well technically they didn’t ban abortions altogether”).
As for constitutional but not partisan, it was a 6-3 decision along ideological lines. And famously the criticism from the left of Roe v Wade was that it found protection in the wrong parts of the constitution - that it was based on privacy and physician rights instead of women’s rights. So you’d have to be willfully trying to deceive to paint this as a non-partisan issue.
You act as if this is the first time that expanding the court has been discussed.
Congress has yet to do this because it will never pass - at least unless one party gets a filibuster-proof majority in the senate or the filibuster is removed.
> And lets the President know that his nominees for the 12 new positions will need to understand who's the real boss.
And who, in your view, is supposed to be the real boss? Congress? Or the President?
The Supreme Court is supposed to be independent. Changing that needs a much higher threshold than "bell-cot doesn't like some recent Supreme Court decisions".
I have a fantasy solution that I know will never be implemented, but in my mind resolves all objections to expanding the court.
Promote all eleven judges in the DC circuit court of appeals to the Supreme Court and leave the appeals court empty. For each vacancy that occurs on the Supreme Court, the president gets to pick one judge for the appeals court, until the Supreme Court justice count is back to 9 and the appeals court judge count is back to 11; at which time things go back to status quo ante.
This would allow the Supreme Court to be rebalanced without the president packing the court with partisan choices. Rather, it respects the record of judicial confirmations for the appeals court going back almost 40 years and several presidential administrations.
It would increase the number of perspectives on the court and make the Justices work harder to find consensus, rather than the majority being able to lazily fall back on pet legal theories that are out of the mainstream.
It would counter and largely nullify the Republican strategy of targeting the Supreme Court with nomination of extremist and underqualified candidates with significant questions about their backgrounds, and confirming the nominees with dubious political maneuvering.
It would be hard for Republicans to escalate; i.e., if a Democratic president added 12 slots to the Supreme court, what's to stop a Republican president and congress adding 20 more at first opportunity, and so on. Republicans could choose to elevate another court's judges to the Supreme Court, but that would tend to further balance the Court and make decisions more unpredictable, rather than produce a clear partisan advantage.
It would take the Supreme Court nomination issue out of presidential politics for a generation.
Despite FDR being quite popular with his New Deal laws, his own party was prepared to toss his ass out for trying to stack the Supreme Court in order to keep parts of his New Deal alive.
It would be political suicide for either side to do that.
Complaining people have been suggesting it for a long time. They seem to be of the "anyone who doesn't agree with me is obviously either stupid or evil" type.
I'm with you, though, that it feels more possible than it ever has before. If it does actually happen, it's going to be a huge change. The Supreme Court will no longer have any believable claim of being unpartisan, and democratic norms will be broken in a much broader way than ever before (barring January 6).
So if it happens, take note. America after that won't be what it was before it.
There are so many things happening in America in just the past 6 years that it’s nothing like anything that has happened in existence - each year.
I have never seen an insurrection in America. Legislators in the American Capital had to be evacuated not from an invading army, but people with some plan to overthrow them. Trump alone is so dense with examples of “wont be the same” that I can only think of fractals when I try and list the things that have happened.
The US went through a civil war. A President was impeached. The US was defeated in a war in Asia. We had race riots every few weeks. National leaders were assassinated with alarming regularity.
The idea that the last few years have been "nothing like anything that has happened in existence" seems quite naive.
> Legislators in the American Capital had to be evacuated not from an invading army
And some even claimed to be there who weren't for political points.
Exactly, the statement is very telling of the lack of understanding of how our government is supposed to operate, how and why the system is set up the way it is.
Obvious check #2: Congress enlarges the Supreme Count to 21 Justices. And lets the President know that his nominees for the 12 new positions will need to understand who's the real boss.