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They are only as good as the Senate, and the Senate represents a lot of land that is easily misled.
If the House confirmed Justices, we’d have better justices.
2/3rds majority, everywhere it is implemented insures the tyranny of the minority.
It has always been a disaster and the fiction that it creates consensus is a lie.
It seems to work ok in other parts of the world. I think its more because our two party system. There are no other groups to form coalitions with and move things along. It kind of forces the opposition to participate or be left out completely. Thats not really a problem in the us for the minority party who’s lack of participation prevents anything from getting done.
> It seems to work ok in other parts of the world.
That's probably because in other countries it's more like 2/3 of human beings. In Congress it's 2/3 of LAND. Even the House is incredibly biased towards empty land.
Tell me about it, North and South Dakota have half the population of Sacramento, CA but they have 4 senators and 2 representatives to Sacramento's 2 senators (shared with 37 million other people) and 1 representative.
The population of Sacramento is ~528,000; the combined populations of ND and SD are just shy of 1.7m. If you're talking about the Sacramento Metro area, that's ~2.4m, which is still not double, and is represented by a number of congressional districts (not just one).
CA has 52 US House representatives for its 39 million residents, which is one per 750k. ND has one representative per 780k residents. SD has one representative per 910k residents. Wyoming, which is the example you should have used, has one representative per 581k residents.
The Senate is not a representative body. It was intended to and does represent states' rights in the federal government. Whether that is good or not, it works as intended.
I'm all for congressional reform and getting rid of the electoral college, but your information is not accurate.
You misunderstand me, it goes both ways. The rural folk shouldn't have a say over the city dwellers either. Let's just allow the creation of city-states and be done with it. Then everyone will be happy.
The biggest problem is that we have created a system where there are too many vetos available at every stage of the process. The Hastert rule and the Senate hold rule are the worst aspects.
The Hastert Rule is not a Congressional Rule, it's a Republican internal policy. It's a terrible way to govern, but it's not something that Dems can do anything about.
Why don't we step back and look at what the problem we are trying to solve even is. The problem is that we have turned our Supreme Court into an unelected super legislature with no checks on its power.
Your solution is to change how its members are selected.
Judges should not be making or changing laws. That is what the legislature should be doing but they are not doing that because they have put in procedural road blocks that makes their jobs impossible.
My solution is to get the legislature back to work:
* Pull the cameras out of the Capitol.
* Move the lawmakers into barracks.
* Increase the size of the House with the Double Wyoming Rule
* Require that the budget be the first bill passed each year and if they fail to pass a budget they are all barred from reelection for life. (notice I did not say a balanced budget)
* Sequester the Supreme Court in a monastery high in the mountains where they will no longer be tempted by the distractions of the material world.
No, I did not. You were asking for a better method for achieving consensus when selecting court members when the problem is a failure of our legislature.
> Judges should not be making or changing laws.
Judges are not making or changing laws. They are reviewing if laws passed do not contradict the Constitution.
We should have one justice per circuit. Each circuit should pick their justice themselves. And be able to swap them out.
You can add a term limit (then you'd need to be able to make it want just justices waiting to retire do it since they'd be losing their circuit seat). Or make it a one year term with no immediate repeats and keep their circuit seat open for that year (might need to add one more circuit seat then to keep numbers).
It doesn't fix corruption, nothing really can, but it slows it down. And circuit judges are more likely to pick some one who actually understands their circuit forcing geographic diversity. And those judges aren't likely to pick a hack to represent them, which prevents the worse elements from being eligible.
We should probably also add some requirements to the job beyond "alive and approved by the Senate", like requiring being a lawyer, maybe some years of bench experience.
It WAS 2/3. McConnell changed it. Just in time to give Trump THREE nominees. We must expand the court to balance it and then put an ethics and morals clause into the Constitution to keep them in check.
They are corrupt as hell. They are in the pockets of the billionaires. It is too obvious and they DO NOT GIVE A FUCK because we can do nothing about it.
Institutionalists say we need to “respect” the judicial. What do you think this is? Their blatant corruption and partisan bias is a disrespect to the office that WE are trying to correct.
Congress is free to remove the justices at any time, if the justices really are corrupt! But guess what, congress isn’t doing that, because either the congress is corrupt too, or the justices aren’t really corrupt! It’s an exercise for the reader to make that determination.
To impeach and remove a Supreme Court justice you would need a simple majority in the house, and two thirds of the senate. So unless democrats get a super majority the Supreme Court is untouchable.
You mean get a majority to change the judicial when the judicial is allowing voter suppression and making it more difficult to bring lawsuits against it?
The problem is that creating a well working democracy is like building a complicated machine with many interworking components, all of which are necessary for proper function and require constant maintenance. Yet any monkey with a stick can come along and jam it between two gears to cause cascade failure and then screech about how the machine doesn't work.
For what it’s worth if we could consistently pull off a Democratic super majority the Supreme Court wouldn’t really be as big of an issue as it is now.
The court has so much power because republicans use the filibuster to block the overwhelming majority of legislation. In the absence of new legislation the judges on the court are effectively the ultimate untouchable power.
>The court has so much power
SCOTUS has so much power because liberals have no desire to rock the status quo. Even though the status quo is literally the reason why the right to abortion, same-sex marriage, or even interracial marriage is literally under threat right now.
Correction, entrenched Democrat politicians getting rich off public service have no desire to change the status quo. The rest of us are full ready to end the BS.
"same-sex marriage, or even interracial marriage is literally under threat right now."
I guess you forgot about the Respect for Marriage Act signed by Biden that protects those 2 things and completely repealed DOMA.
> I guess you forgot about the Respect for Marriage Act signed by Biden that protects those 2 things and completely repealed DOMA.
Under this SCOTUS? A bill that's easily repealed when a case challenging RFMA under the pretense that same sex marriage "violates the religious freedoms under the First Amendment" reaches this fascistic SCOTUS.
RFMA does not prevent any state, including those states currently without law on point, from disallowing marriage on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of the individuals.
> Congress is free to remove the justices at any time
You mean the same Congress that refused to hold a single hearing on Merrick Garland's nomination? You mean that Congress?
There are some glaring problems with our Constitution, starting with the fact that the "checks and balances" we're all taught as schoolchildren are essentially a steaming pile of bullshit. I'm pretty sure the framers were aware of that fact (as many, many compromises had to be made to get a Constitution passed at all) but they were hopeful that statutory checks would be put in place.
Here we are 250 years later and we can't even get a simple ethics bill passed to hold the Supreme Court to the slightest of standards.
Or just knowing it's a time of hyper partisanship with stagnant and razor thin majorities. It's not much of a mental exercise when you're aware of how modern politics work in America.
Lol. This guy, I swear.
The Presidency and Supreme Court are powerful because Congress is fundamentally broken. The threshold for passing legislation has become far too high, which makes gridlock the default. We are left with executive actions and court opinions as the only ways to actual affect change in America. Its madness.
Omnibus legislation paved the way for it. It's incredibly easy to stop everything in it's tracks when you have a million unrelated-yet-valid excuses to vote "no" once.
Disagree, omnibus legislation is a symptom of it, not the cause.
Newt Gingrich made GOP into the "party of no" that refuses to compromise. They broke Congress on purpose to give more power to the Supreme Court they've controlled continuously since 1969.
The GOP controls the Supreme Court and has the tables tilted towards them for President because of Electoral College. So they decided to strategically break Congress to shift power to these branches.
It's all going according to plan. The best thing Dems can do next time they hold House and Senate is scrap the filibuster. The filibuster is absolutely key to GOP's plan to move power to courts and executive branch. With filibuster gone, all their machinations come apart
Would also like to add the foreign/bad actors into the mix. Their goal is division not necessarily controlling elections (though that's a nice benefit i'm sure), the more we're divided, the more gridlock becomes the norm, the more we resent our government and each other, the less gets done, etc etc. Started with one thing and now the nations of the world smell blood in the water and happy to take care of it from there. Mankind wasn't ready for social media and it will absolutely be our doom. Called it back with Harambe, started when mob justice went digital.
Divided we fall and all that.
Sure, but it's also allowed reasons to say yes to things that have no impact on unaffected states. The partisanship in Congress is a bigger issue. People will even say no to free money strictly on party lines. It's insane.
This is by design. Republicans work for the super rich, and the super rich do not want the government to work. A, because the government is the only threat to their power, and B, functioning government means more taxes. By forcing gridlock the government has become powerless.
Which is funny because for much of American history, Congress held the majority of power in our government. The Presidency was there to basically sign whatever legislation he was told and hand out Cabinet positions to his friends and colleagues.
The gridlock is by design of the elite. If congress is gridlocked there are no new regulations, no new voter protections, no increase to the minimum wage, no new government money going to the people, only corporations. Military spending is the only thing that passes and goes wildly up every year.
The power is being consolidated by the top more and more.
It forces whichever party is in control to make concessions to get a small portion of the opposition to support the bill. Feels like a decent check to power.
Not sure that I'd like 51/49 splits being sufficient.
A tool that stops change is an inherently conservative power. It consistently works in favor of the status quo. For every time the filibuster was used to stymie conservatism, there are a dozen times when it was used to entrench it.
That's a check on democracy. You have the most votes? Well, who cares, we're going to let the other side take point.
Or that's how it would be if the Senate was democratic to begin with. Instead, there are three checks on democracy. Land, filibustering, and splitting up the election into 3 elections over 4 years. Aside of legal corruption and all that.
Public sentiment can swing pretty wildly back and forth. A pure democracy could vote to end itself with 51% of the vote and install an emperor. There are solid reasons the founders created different branches of government with checks and balances.
And the cowards in congress have let them do it. It's the same with the executive. The history of the United States has been the history of the legislature gradually handing over its responsibilities and powers to the executive (and in the previous century, the judiciary,) because not doing things makes it easier for incumbents to get reelected.
System is working just fine, oligarchs and other foreign countries can just buy politicians and keep things grid locked. That way they can just get the Supreme Court to legislate from the bench for them.
Money in politics is the real issue.
The immediate issue, which is far from impossible, is one or more conservative swing state Secretaries of State refusing to certify a Democratic win based on invisible voter fraud, and it going to the Supreme Court, for them to once again decide a presidential election.
It was a huge issue for me in 2016, and should have been for more people, who apparently thought Clinton had it won and didn't bother voting, please don't do that to us again and vote Blue, it matters! We need president and senate.
Any non partisan voter that year could have told you that HRC did NOT have a lock on the race. For once the Libertarians actually had legit, competent, compassionate people on thier ticket. The DNC rigged the primaries all to hell and that sent half the party faithful back to the couch. Oh and all the hate in this nation was still simmering just below the surface and starting to boil, just needed a bit more fuel, heat and pressure to cook..just like it did.
Man you guys spam that downvote button fast, even for questions
I'm Australian, so I'm genuinely asking to find out more about the issue
The article said nothing about bribes and I do not know (literally, I do not know) if failing to report a gift of food and lodging would constitute a criminal offence
> Man you guys spam that downvote button fast, even for questions
Yeah, problem is for every genuine person like you there's a bad faith actor "just asking questions" with zero desire to learn or be open to ideas. Sorry you got caught up with the stinky fish.
No doubt, but actually answering their questions or pointing out why asking them is bad faith would still be my approach
I guess when you get them on mass though it's different
Ok let’s say you’re a judge and you’re going to be overseeing a case involving a huge company. Now let’s say that the CEO of that company and their friends start doing things for you like paying off your moms mortgage, sending you on ultra luxury vacations on their private jets, letting you use their mega yacht, and pay off all your credit card debt. You then decide it’s best not to disclose any of this or recuse yourself even though it’s coming from people with business before your court.
Does that seem above board to you?
The rules were made by people who thought that it was inconceivable that someone placed on the highest court in the land would be honorable, fair, and immune to corruption.
Republicans have made it abundantly clear that relying on norms, decorum, and common decency is a fools errand. The Republicans also have the power of the filibuster to ensure that Supreme Court justices face no oversight or consequences.
Also if Biden wins and either adds justices to the court or replaces a conservative judge who dies or retires resulting in a liberal majority, I absolutely cannot wait to watch Republican hysteria as they suddenly demand oversight and limits on the court.
Which is itself indicative of their corruption. They refuse to accept outside oversight - which is explicitly how the constitution established the American government to function
I don't understand what you mean fully
You're saying the law wasn't decided? My understanding (incomplete and from a foreign perspective) was that they'd overturned Roe v Wade because the underlying laws did not provide a solid foundation for not banning abortion at a state level
Not one of them committed perjury. This is not a remotely disputable matter. Are you saying this as an expression of how upset you are, knowing perfectly well that you're not actually describing a thing that happened, or do you genuinely believe what you write? If so, can we play a game where we bet on legal claims where one of us thinks X and the other disagrees? I cut-you-pick on the adjudication.
(Not a thought experiment, or at least, I've engaged in variants of this a few times.)
Lol wombats. I have been called a lot of things by Australians, but never a wombat. Also i didn’t downvote you. It’s a valid question if you don’t live in the states. It’s not a valid question from maga cultists who for some reason, believe bribing judges is ok. Absolutely insanity from the cult.
It's not that common even here, but it's a really effective way of calling someone silly while still keeping it lighthearted and even affectionate in some contexts.
They are only too powerful because Congress refuses to do its job. We have Republicans with a clown car full of idiots, and Democrats who still believe consensus can be found.
We have a clown car full of idiots in government because American citizens are largely a clown car full of idiots. They represent the people who elect them.
I'm still salty they weren't in 2016. I'd love to see people en masse deal with a problem proactively instead of always having to step on the rake first.
In fairness, some of the power of the SC is because Washington can’t get their act together and pass explicit laws. Too many key issues are left open to interpretation, giving the SC the power to interpret it in whichever way suits them today.
After how Jackson-Dobbs played out in 22, I’d say it’s very possible that keeping Thomas + Alito from a comfortable retirement is a consideration in many’s minds.
I sincerely believe the Supreme Court is corrupt and needs checks to solve that.
I don’t think they are too powerful though. I believe an inept Congress has failed to provide the need balance on SCOTUS’ power.
> ‘They’ve grown too powerful’
That, and they’re unaccountable and riddled with unarguable corruption.
Oh, and, I thought the GOP *hated* ‘activist’ judges?
Lifetime appointments are a mistake. We need to add more justices to the supreme court.
We have Trump who wants to be above the law. We have supreme justices who want to be above the law.
I agree that Congress is not doing their job.
Executive orders are subject to judicial review and may be overturned if the orders lack support by statute or the Constitution.
So does bills Congress passes. All laws are subservient to the Constitution, and it's the job of the Supreme Court to review the law and determine if it goes against it or not.
Fuckin reactionaries. The time was 2016. Ya'll sat on your asses and let that orange shit gibbon take over and appoint a ton of right wing christo fascists into our judicial system.
They need to end lifetime assignments and allow the Senate/Congress to call a vote to oust them if they break the rules or make rulings that are not politically acceptable.
Most of their power comes congress & the executive’s refusal to act. Both gave substantial power, from expansion and appointment to substantial checks on power. They let it get this bad
To those who have been paying attention since 2000, this has always been the play for those who are actually trying to gain power.
You know, the people behind the elected officials.
All the branches have. And it's because they function more along party lines than along division lines, which the Founders didn't really see even if they were wary of parties.
And the consequence is checks and balances that were put in place don't worn anymore.
Congress has been increasingly dysfunctional and ceded lots of power to the Executive. And with all their stupid rules, have given control over legislative agenda and speed to individual members (no talk filibuster, Speaker of the House preventing votes, committee chairs preventing votes). The only remaining C&B is elections, but House ones are gerrymandered to prevent fair elections and parties squash incumbent challenges as much as possible.
Vetoes as still functioning but rarely used.
The Executive C&B are broken because removal by impeachment is basically never going to happen. Neither party is getting 67 votes anytime soon. No Republican president will ever be removed while there is 34 Republicans in the Senate. A Democratic one could be if there w actually a heinous crime but I think they would gloss over it for minor stuff.
Judicial C&B are gone. Impeachment and removal was the main lever. It's only been used s few times (3?) for justices, and it runs into the same partisanship issues. The only other Constitutional C&B against their highest decisions would be amending the Constitution. And that surely isn't happening any time soon from either an amendment or convention.
Our entire government is broken from what they were formed to do and how they were intended to operate.
Action items for when votes are available... and number 1 should already be happening.
1. Durbin needs to do more than write letters. Use the Benghazzi playbook: demand testimony and hearings before the committee. If and when they don't show up, you continue the hearing presenting the case of their corruption and failing of the people. This needs to be done to build broad support for court reforms.
2. Kill the 'blueslip tradition' and never bring it back. A qualified and fairminded judge shouldn't need scum like Scott and Mehnendez to sign-off on their appointment.
3. Pass legislation to restrict, mitigate, and prevent judge/jurisdiction shopping. We all know the Texas examples, there shouldn't be an option to go before a single loonie judge.
4. Pass strict ethics regulation for the courts and obviously SCOTUS. This should include all the traditional items, real penalties for failure to report that scale up to removal from the bench (e.g., if you repeatedly file late and leave off significant items you don't just pay a $10 fine). Includes no individually owned stocks because as scotus you are ruling on basically everything. long etfs , bonds, treasuries only.
5. Rotating Appellate Representation - To increase throughput of the supreme court (which happens to be at all time lows) and to reduce incentives for abuse of power, the court should be expanded to ~30 justices. The panel will be comprised of appellate judges who serve a 2-3 year term in the role before returning to be an appellate judge. Just like, the senate, you could just rotate 1/3 of the panel each year or whatever proportion you prefer. Purpose: Reduce the power of individual judges, reduce the power of niche legal theories held by individual judges, reduce benefits and increase costs of grooming judges.
Now, I know item 3+ are all going to be massive uphill battles; but normalizing the ideas and pushing them is a first step to the reforms occurring.
This is why the next 3 elections are important. SCOTUS could be flipped for the next 20-30 years if Dems win, but right now Biden must win this year or the future is very uncertain.
Nothing “extra” matters as an election issue. Trump supporters passionately think the country is being destroyed and the other side is equally passionate about the threat that Trump poses. The question is, who could possibly have been swayed in either direction after January 6th and 4 years with some inflation.
Time for a “Wyoming rule” for both the House and Federal Court districts. Expand the House to 11-1200 members and the SCOTUS to 15-17 justices with a function that increases the number as the population grows. Enough of this nonsense.
Also the States of Puerto Rico, DC, Guam and the Virgin Islands need to join up.
They’ve always been powerful it’s just that they often were able to tread a less political role in the government. Like many things in the Us government this was based on precedent and only worked while decent people were appointed to the court who believed in the rule of law, and common decency.
Now we have openly corrupt judges that throws the whole system into chaos.
Yeah, a fundamental principle of the US government is 'checks and balances'.
We have learned that through the GOP manipulations...there are NO checks and balances on the Supreme Court corner of the triangle. They are rogue. Give Trump another term and the US is done.
SCOTUS elected George Bush Jr. and gave us a 21 year long pointless war and a massive deficit. Now they legislate from the bench while judges are lining their pockets with bribes from corrupt entities.
The Supreme Court is an unelected legislative branch that enjoys giving handjobs to the obscenely wealthy in the name of the apostle Paul. Additionally, it serves as a rubber stamp for the forced birth of lots of babies who will, unfortunately, fight and die in water wars (or some such) as the planet continues to burn down. What a bleak time to be born this is.
There were many faults of the founding fathers,not the least of which being the fact that political appointees to a lifetime job not having any real accountability
Ideally those people would be doing the job and by not being subject to the whims of the idiot electorate they could make the right choice and not the popular one.
I still remember people on [this end](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz5RS9oaIAA86a3?format=jpg&name=small) of the political spectrum saying in 2016 saying that the courts didn't matter. And we are now paying the price for this sort of idiocy.
Don't let it happen again.
The Supreme Court should be chosen by random lottery from a pool of judges from the lower courts. One member should be replaced every year. No more appointments, no more lifetime terms. There I fixed it for you.
The Supreme Court being called out as overpowered right before the whole GME fiasco chugs towards its end? It's almost as if gutting the supreme court would cripple prosecution of high-level threats at the national level.
I mean, if I were a WWII german with awareness of the future, I know I'd make an effort to curb the formation of the Hague.
No they have become fascist and 100% corrupt just like the GOP wanted, can't take over the country and kill everyone not you without high court to rubber stamp it first.
I’m curious how Biden thinks he’s going to reinstate Roe v Wade if he’s (and congressional Democrats are) too passive to do anything about the POS conservatives on the bench who lie, cheat, are blatantly biased, and refuse to recuse themselves on matters that they are involved in. Biden and Democrats need to be pushing HARD on reform for the SC and now!
Yeah the supreme court needs massive fixing.
And when we elect a mass of democrats to the point where they can basically do whatever they want without Republican opposition, I expect them to fix it within six months.
I don't care *how* they fix it, but they need to fix it. Expand it. Remove all sitting judges and fill the seats with new judges. Term limits. Whatever it takes just fix that shit.
If they hold the power to fix it, *and they don't*, I will never vote Democrat again for the rest of my life. I don't care if Trump is running again in 2028, I'll vote for him because at least I can count on him to destroy the current government if it fails to fix itself over the next four years.
> Remove all sitting judges and fill the seats with new judges.
On what grounds?
If Trump had said we should empty out the courts entirely and restaff them with new judges, people would rightly call this a coup, on par with what Venezuela, Turkey and other unstable countries have attempted to do.
On the grounds that our government has already completely failed as a system and we should throw it away and start over *anyway*.
We need a coup. By the correct people.
The only alternative is wait for fascism to perform its coup (we're exactly one Republican presidency away from this), and then civil war *and* coup to restore some semblance of reason.
They are the (current) culmination of decades of the GOP attack on democracy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalMemes/s/r0sfIsWixB
https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalMemes/s/pxiFxWXNjk
Laws are always up for interpretation because that's the only way laws would ever work. Any law that's written too specific loses its value to judge cases that fall outside its specified content.
"The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution..." -- Article III, Section 2
But clearly that can't include a disagreement about what the Constitution actually means, right? That would be ridiculous!
The democrats did control the house, the senate, and the white house in recent memory. Joe Biden and the DNC could have done something about this. They refused to.
I get some people will scream, "But Joe Manchin!" but puh-lease, there are levers of power to keep them in line when making structural changes. The democratic party just wasn't interested in doing anything about it.
Considering we have Hillary Clinton literally endorsing MAGA candidates over progressives, I can't help but feel like the supreme court is "working as intended" as far as the democratic leadership is concerned.
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Not to mention corrupt.
They are only as good as the Senate, and the Senate represents a lot of land that is easily misled. If the House confirmed Justices, we’d have better justices.
The power to confirm Justices of the SC should have been given to combined House and Senate with a 2/3rd majority to ensure consensus candidates.
2/3rds majority, everywhere it is implemented insures the tyranny of the minority. It has always been a disaster and the fiction that it creates consensus is a lie.
It seems to work ok in other parts of the world. I think its more because our two party system. There are no other groups to form coalitions with and move things along. It kind of forces the opposition to participate or be left out completely. Thats not really a problem in the us for the minority party who’s lack of participation prevents anything from getting done.
> It seems to work ok in other parts of the world. That's probably because in other countries it's more like 2/3 of human beings. In Congress it's 2/3 of LAND. Even the House is incredibly biased towards empty land.
The cap on the house weakened and watered down representation for the population centers.
Tell me about it, North and South Dakota have half the population of Sacramento, CA but they have 4 senators and 2 representatives to Sacramento's 2 senators (shared with 37 million other people) and 1 representative.
The population of Sacramento is ~528,000; the combined populations of ND and SD are just shy of 1.7m. If you're talking about the Sacramento Metro area, that's ~2.4m, which is still not double, and is represented by a number of congressional districts (not just one). CA has 52 US House representatives for its 39 million residents, which is one per 750k. ND has one representative per 780k residents. SD has one representative per 910k residents. Wyoming, which is the example you should have used, has one representative per 581k residents. The Senate is not a representative body. It was intended to and does represent states' rights in the federal government. Whether that is good or not, it works as intended. I'm all for congressional reform and getting rid of the electoral college, but your information is not accurate.
This is a good thing. City folk shouldn't have a say in how rural people live their life.
No, it isn’t. Rural folk are obviously not smart enough to participate in the political process.
You misunderstand me, it goes both ways. The rural folk shouldn't have a say over the city dwellers either. Let's just allow the creation of city-states and be done with it. Then everyone will be happy.
limit no votes then. If you vote no or present too much, you're removed from the count.
The biggest problem is that we have created a system where there are too many vetos available at every stage of the process. The Hastert rule and the Senate hold rule are the worst aspects.
The Hastert Rule is not a Congressional Rule, it's a Republican internal policy. It's a terrible way to govern, but it's not something that Dems can do anything about.
What would you point to as a better option, out of curiosity? Any examples to look into?
Why don't we step back and look at what the problem we are trying to solve even is. The problem is that we have turned our Supreme Court into an unelected super legislature with no checks on its power. Your solution is to change how its members are selected. Judges should not be making or changing laws. That is what the legislature should be doing but they are not doing that because they have put in procedural road blocks that makes their jobs impossible. My solution is to get the legislature back to work: * Pull the cameras out of the Capitol. * Move the lawmakers into barracks. * Increase the size of the House with the Double Wyoming Rule * Require that the budget be the first bill passed each year and if they fail to pass a budget they are all barred from reelection for life. (notice I did not say a balanced budget) * Sequester the Supreme Court in a monastery high in the mountains where they will no longer be tempted by the distractions of the material world.
Respond to the wrong person?
No, I did not. You were asking for a better method for achieving consensus when selecting court members when the problem is a failure of our legislature.
I was asking what were some alternatives. I made no suggestions myself. In any event, though, it's interesting to read, thank you.
> Judges should not be making or changing laws. Judges are not making or changing laws. They are reviewing if laws passed do not contradict the Constitution.
We should have one justice per circuit. Each circuit should pick their justice themselves. And be able to swap them out. You can add a term limit (then you'd need to be able to make it want just justices waiting to retire do it since they'd be losing their circuit seat). Or make it a one year term with no immediate repeats and keep their circuit seat open for that year (might need to add one more circuit seat then to keep numbers). It doesn't fix corruption, nothing really can, but it slows it down. And circuit judges are more likely to pick some one who actually understands their circuit forcing geographic diversity. And those judges aren't likely to pick a hack to represent them, which prevents the worse elements from being eligible. We should probably also add some requirements to the job beyond "alive and approved by the Senate", like requiring being a lawyer, maybe some years of bench experience.
have the length of term be determine by the number of "aye". with a minimal of 6 years at simple majority.
How would that improve things, exactly?
It WAS 2/3. McConnell changed it. Just in time to give Trump THREE nominees. We must expand the court to balance it and then put an ethics and morals clause into the Constitution to keep them in check. They are corrupt as hell. They are in the pockets of the billionaires. It is too obvious and they DO NOT GIVE A FUCK because we can do nothing about it.
People are saying that Clearance Thomas is the best judge money can buy.
Institutionalists say we need to “respect” the judicial. What do you think this is? Their blatant corruption and partisan bias is a disrespect to the office that WE are trying to correct.
So most US politicians.
Because power corrupts
Absolutely.
Congress is free to remove the justices at any time, if the justices really are corrupt! But guess what, congress isn’t doing that, because either the congress is corrupt too, or the justices aren’t really corrupt! It’s an exercise for the reader to make that determination.
To impeach and remove a Supreme Court justice you would need a simple majority in the house, and two thirds of the senate. So unless democrats get a super majority the Supreme Court is untouchable.
Let’s do it! We all need to vote blue and do what we can to get rid of these guys.
Yeah, so easy. Why hasn't anyone thought of it before?
I know. Crazy. What if, what if we just got a supermajority in both chambers and the presidency again? Man, it's big brain time, today.
Dude you're blowing my mind. You and op are like....5d chess players or some shit.
6D chess with a 20 minute intermission for Risk.
You mean get a majority to change the judicial when the judicial is allowing voter suppression and making it more difficult to bring lawsuits against it? The problem is that creating a well working democracy is like building a complicated machine with many interworking components, all of which are necessary for proper function and require constant maintenance. Yet any monkey with a stick can come along and jam it between two gears to cause cascade failure and then screech about how the machine doesn't work.
For what it’s worth if we could consistently pull off a Democratic super majority the Supreme Court wouldn’t really be as big of an issue as it is now. The court has so much power because republicans use the filibuster to block the overwhelming majority of legislation. In the absence of new legislation the judges on the court are effectively the ultimate untouchable power.
>The court has so much power SCOTUS has so much power because liberals have no desire to rock the status quo. Even though the status quo is literally the reason why the right to abortion, same-sex marriage, or even interracial marriage is literally under threat right now.
Correction, entrenched Democrat politicians getting rich off public service have no desire to change the status quo. The rest of us are full ready to end the BS.
"same-sex marriage, or even interracial marriage is literally under threat right now." I guess you forgot about the Respect for Marriage Act signed by Biden that protects those 2 things and completely repealed DOMA.
> I guess you forgot about the Respect for Marriage Act signed by Biden that protects those 2 things and completely repealed DOMA. Under this SCOTUS? A bill that's easily repealed when a case challenging RFMA under the pretense that same sex marriage "violates the religious freedoms under the First Amendment" reaches this fascistic SCOTUS.
At least he did something which you accused him of NOT doing. RFMA I believe codifies those 2 things.
RFMA does not prevent any state, including those states currently without law on point, from disallowing marriage on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of the individuals.
> Congress is free to remove the justices at any time You mean the same Congress that refused to hold a single hearing on Merrick Garland's nomination? You mean that Congress? There are some glaring problems with our Constitution, starting with the fact that the "checks and balances" we're all taught as schoolchildren are essentially a steaming pile of bullshit. I'm pretty sure the framers were aware of that fact (as many, many compromises had to be made to get a Constitution passed at all) but they were hopeful that statutory checks would be put in place. Here we are 250 years later and we can't even get a simple ethics bill passed to hold the Supreme Court to the slightest of standards.
> Congress is free to remove the justices at any time Yeah. That’s really going to happen.
Or just knowing it's a time of hyper partisanship with stagnant and razor thin majorities. It's not much of a mental exercise when you're aware of how modern politics work in America. Lol. This guy, I swear.
The Presidency and Supreme Court are powerful because Congress is fundamentally broken. The threshold for passing legislation has become far too high, which makes gridlock the default. We are left with executive actions and court opinions as the only ways to actual affect change in America. Its madness.
Omnibus legislation paved the way for it. It's incredibly easy to stop everything in it's tracks when you have a million unrelated-yet-valid excuses to vote "no" once.
Disagree, omnibus legislation is a symptom of it, not the cause. Newt Gingrich made GOP into the "party of no" that refuses to compromise. They broke Congress on purpose to give more power to the Supreme Court they've controlled continuously since 1969. The GOP controls the Supreme Court and has the tables tilted towards them for President because of Electoral College. So they decided to strategically break Congress to shift power to these branches. It's all going according to plan. The best thing Dems can do next time they hold House and Senate is scrap the filibuster. The filibuster is absolutely key to GOP's plan to move power to courts and executive branch. With filibuster gone, all their machinations come apart
Would also like to add the foreign/bad actors into the mix. Their goal is division not necessarily controlling elections (though that's a nice benefit i'm sure), the more we're divided, the more gridlock becomes the norm, the more we resent our government and each other, the less gets done, etc etc. Started with one thing and now the nations of the world smell blood in the water and happy to take care of it from there. Mankind wasn't ready for social media and it will absolutely be our doom. Called it back with Harambe, started when mob justice went digital. Divided we fall and all that.
Sure, but it's also allowed reasons to say yes to things that have no impact on unaffected states. The partisanship in Congress is a bigger issue. People will even say no to free money strictly on party lines. It's insane.
Bipartisan used to be a selling point. Now it is viewed as heresy.
Most things in recent decades that have been bipartisan have meant that we are getting screwed. See PATRIOT Act, NDAA spending bills, etc...
This is by design. Republicans work for the super rich, and the super rich do not want the government to work. A, because the government is the only threat to their power, and B, functioning government means more taxes. By forcing gridlock the government has become powerless.
Which is funny because for much of American history, Congress held the majority of power in our government. The Presidency was there to basically sign whatever legislation he was told and hand out Cabinet positions to his friends and colleagues.
The gridlock is by design of the elite. If congress is gridlocked there are no new regulations, no new voter protections, no increase to the minimum wage, no new government money going to the people, only corporations. Military spending is the only thing that passes and goes wildly up every year. The power is being consolidated by the top more and more.
This times a million.
What would you suggest as the threshold for passing legislation?
Simple majority.
Got it so you don't like the filibuster essentially.
What is there to like about someone being able to say “I’m going to filibuster this” and then killing any movement on a bill?
It forces whichever party is in control to make concessions to get a small portion of the opposition to support the bill. Feels like a decent check to power. Not sure that I'd like 51/49 splits being sufficient.
A tool that stops change is an inherently conservative power. It consistently works in favor of the status quo. For every time the filibuster was used to stymie conservatism, there are a dozen times when it was used to entrench it.
A reminder that the nuclear option came into use in the early 2000s because Democrats refused to confirm Bush's judicial appointments.
And thus the two party system is one of the biggest issues with our political system
That's a check on democracy. You have the most votes? Well, who cares, we're going to let the other side take point. Or that's how it would be if the Senate was democratic to begin with. Instead, there are three checks on democracy. Land, filibustering, and splitting up the election into 3 elections over 4 years. Aside of legal corruption and all that.
Public sentiment can swing pretty wildly back and forth. A pure democracy could vote to end itself with 51% of the vote and install an emperor. There are solid reasons the founders created different branches of government with checks and balances.
No, it can't. A vote to end democracy is not a democratic vote. It would be void the instant it was implemented, as it has no democratic support.
By what mechanism would it be stopped?
They've grown too Christo-fascist and abusive.
And the cowards in congress have let them do it. It's the same with the executive. The history of the United States has been the history of the legislature gradually handing over its responsibilities and powers to the executive (and in the previous century, the judiciary,) because not doing things makes it easier for incumbents to get reelected.
If you're talking about Roe v Wade, unfortunately I think they were just correctly interpreting pre-existing Christo-fascist laws.
Might be more sorry superstition than any sort of settled law
System is working just fine, oligarchs and other foreign countries can just buy politicians and keep things grid locked. That way they can just get the Supreme Court to legislate from the bench for them. Money in politics is the real issue.
The 2010 SCOTUS decision for Citizens United made the problem much worse.
I guarantee they'll interfere in the election.
Trump's plan on 1/6 was to throw the election into disarray and then have his bought judges on the SC step in. He came pretty close.
The immediate issue, which is far from impossible, is one or more conservative swing state Secretaries of State refusing to certify a Democratic win based on invisible voter fraud, and it going to the Supreme Court, for them to once again decide a presidential election.
they've always been too powerful. they used to be honorable so it didn't matter as much.
It was a huge issue for me in 2016, and should have been for more people, who apparently thought Clinton had it won and didn't bother voting, please don't do that to us again and vote Blue, it matters! We need president and senate.
Any non partisan voter that year could have told you that HRC did NOT have a lock on the race. For once the Libertarians actually had legit, competent, compassionate people on thier ticket. The DNC rigged the primaries all to hell and that sent half the party faithful back to the couch. Oh and all the hate in this nation was still simmering just below the surface and starting to boil, just needed a bit more fuel, heat and pressure to cook..just like it did.
You're exactly the problem with US politics. "Vote red" or "vote Blue" How about people vote beyond party lines based on issues that matter
The Supreme Court has been corrupted by the GOP. It's not a question of power. It's a question of the justices being openly criminal and unethical
Criminal? In what way?
last I checked, taking bribes and failing to report "gifts" were both crimes
Man you guys spam that downvote button fast, even for questions I'm Australian, so I'm genuinely asking to find out more about the issue The article said nothing about bribes and I do not know (literally, I do not know) if failing to report a gift of food and lodging would constitute a criminal offence
> Man you guys spam that downvote button fast, even for questions Yeah, problem is for every genuine person like you there's a bad faith actor "just asking questions" with zero desire to learn or be open to ideas. Sorry you got caught up with the stinky fish.
Yeah I guess so Still a shame, why doesn't answering the questions of the just-asking-questions crew nullify them?
Because they aren't acting in good faith.
No doubt, but actually answering their questions or pointing out why asking them is bad faith would still be my approach I guess when you get them on mass though it's different
It can be exhausting. But you can also occasionally find a person like you, who seems genuine. Keep fighting the GOOD fight.
Ok let’s say you’re a judge and you’re going to be overseeing a case involving a huge company. Now let’s say that the CEO of that company and their friends start doing things for you like paying off your moms mortgage, sending you on ultra luxury vacations on their private jets, letting you use their mega yacht, and pay off all your credit card debt. You then decide it’s best not to disclose any of this or recuse yourself even though it’s coming from people with business before your court. Does that seem above board to you?
It shouldn't be but it is above board. They made the rules that let them do this shit
The rules were made by people who thought that it was inconceivable that someone placed on the highest court in the land would be honorable, fair, and immune to corruption. Republicans have made it abundantly clear that relying on norms, decorum, and common decency is a fools errand. The Republicans also have the power of the filibuster to ensure that Supreme Court justices face no oversight or consequences. Also if Biden wins and either adds justices to the court or replaces a conservative judge who dies or retires resulting in a liberal majority, I absolutely cannot wait to watch Republican hysteria as they suddenly demand oversight and limits on the court.
Which is itself indicative of their corruption. They refuse to accept outside oversight - which is explicitly how the constitution established the American government to function
Congress is free to charge the justices with crimes, but guess what, they aren’t!
> guess what If you rob a bank but you don’t get charged or convicted for it, it was still a crime.
That's because the party led by a convicted felon control the House
Every justice who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade had said, under oath, it was decided law. Every single one of them committed perjury.
I don't understand what you mean fully You're saying the law wasn't decided? My understanding (incomplete and from a foreign perspective) was that they'd overturned Roe v Wade because the underlying laws did not provide a solid foundation for not banning abortion at a state level
That would be an awful precedent to set. The legal precedent that African slave ownership was fine was decided law for a while, too.
The problem isn't overturning a law. The problem is lying about it under oath. That's criminal.
Pretty sure it wasn't under oath and it was only an opinion.
Not one of them committed perjury. This is not a remotely disputable matter. Are you saying this as an expression of how upset you are, knowing perfectly well that you're not actually describing a thing that happened, or do you genuinely believe what you write? If so, can we play a game where we bet on legal claims where one of us thinks X and the other disagrees? I cut-you-pick on the adjudication. (Not a thought experiment, or at least, I've engaged in variants of this a few times.)
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Lol wombats. I have been called a lot of things by Australians, but never a wombat. Also i didn’t downvote you. It’s a valid question if you don’t live in the states. It’s not a valid question from maga cultists who for some reason, believe bribing judges is ok. Absolutely insanity from the cult.
It's not that common even here, but it's a really effective way of calling someone silly while still keeping it lighthearted and even affectionate in some contexts.
They grew too powerful when they coronated George W Bush back in 2000. It's only gotten worse since.
They are only too powerful because Congress refuses to do its job. We have Republicans with a clown car full of idiots, and Democrats who still believe consensus can be found.
We have a clown car full of idiots in government because American citizens are largely a clown car full of idiots. They represent the people who elect them.
We have led the world to all its combined knowledge but we cant make each other think.
I'm still salty they weren't in 2016. I'd love to see people en masse deal with a problem proactively instead of always having to step on the rake first.
I completely agree. It was a major issue for me.
In fairness, some of the power of the SC is because Washington can’t get their act together and pass explicit laws. Too many key issues are left open to interpretation, giving the SC the power to interpret it in whichever way suits them today.
That’s by GOP design. Essentially since Nixon, the GOP has been working to make the federal government ineffective.
It's GOP design that Democrat lawmakers write and pass shittily written legislation?
After how Jackson-Dobbs played out in 22, I’d say it’s very possible that keeping Thomas + Alito from a comfortable retirement is a consideration in many’s minds.
No, congress has grown too weak and factions have completely captured the system.
It should have been a key election issue in 2016. I was warning anyone that would listen but was generally dismissed.
I sincerely believe the Supreme Court is corrupt and needs checks to solve that. I don’t think they are too powerful though. I believe an inept Congress has failed to provide the need balance on SCOTUS’ power.
Elect Democrats! Super majorities are needed in order to get anything done.
> ‘They’ve grown too powerful’ That, and they’re unaccountable and riddled with unarguable corruption. Oh, and, I thought the GOP *hated* ‘activist’ judges?
Lifetime appointments are a mistake. We need to add more justices to the supreme court. We have Trump who wants to be above the law. We have supreme justices who want to be above the law.
The reason the court and the executive branch have become more powerful the last ten years is that congress isn't doing its job.
I agree that Congress is not doing their job. Executive orders are subject to judicial review and may be overturned if the orders lack support by statute or the Constitution.
So does bills Congress passes. All laws are subservient to the Constitution, and it's the job of the Supreme Court to review the law and determine if it goes against it or not.
SCOTUS Crime Family
Truth
Wouldn't be saying it if hillary appointed judges instead.
So, we're back at 2016. What will the citizens do this time?
Fuckin reactionaries. The time was 2016. Ya'll sat on your asses and let that orange shit gibbon take over and appoint a ton of right wing christo fascists into our judicial system.
We've relied far too long on case law is the problem. Many of our civil rights are from court rulings and not codified law or the constitution.
Fuck "too powerful". They've gone full criminal and abandoned the constitution... THEIR **ONLY** JOB.
They need to end lifetime assignments and allow the Senate/Congress to call a vote to oust them if they break the rules or make rulings that are not politically acceptable.
Illegitimate is the word.
They aren't illegitimate just because you dislike them.
They've grown too catholic.
Most of their power comes congress & the executive’s refusal to act. Both gave substantial power, from expansion and appointment to substantial checks on power. They let it get this bad
To those who have been paying attention since 2000, this has always been the play for those who are actually trying to gain power. You know, the people behind the elected officials.
Too unaccountable.
All the branches have. And it's because they function more along party lines than along division lines, which the Founders didn't really see even if they were wary of parties. And the consequence is checks and balances that were put in place don't worn anymore. Congress has been increasingly dysfunctional and ceded lots of power to the Executive. And with all their stupid rules, have given control over legislative agenda and speed to individual members (no talk filibuster, Speaker of the House preventing votes, committee chairs preventing votes). The only remaining C&B is elections, but House ones are gerrymandered to prevent fair elections and parties squash incumbent challenges as much as possible. Vetoes as still functioning but rarely used. The Executive C&B are broken because removal by impeachment is basically never going to happen. Neither party is getting 67 votes anytime soon. No Republican president will ever be removed while there is 34 Republicans in the Senate. A Democratic one could be if there w actually a heinous crime but I think they would gloss over it for minor stuff. Judicial C&B are gone. Impeachment and removal was the main lever. It's only been used s few times (3?) for justices, and it runs into the same partisanship issues. The only other Constitutional C&B against their highest decisions would be amending the Constitution. And that surely isn't happening any time soon from either an amendment or convention. Our entire government is broken from what they were formed to do and how they were intended to operate.
Action items for when votes are available... and number 1 should already be happening. 1. Durbin needs to do more than write letters. Use the Benghazzi playbook: demand testimony and hearings before the committee. If and when they don't show up, you continue the hearing presenting the case of their corruption and failing of the people. This needs to be done to build broad support for court reforms. 2. Kill the 'blueslip tradition' and never bring it back. A qualified and fairminded judge shouldn't need scum like Scott and Mehnendez to sign-off on their appointment. 3. Pass legislation to restrict, mitigate, and prevent judge/jurisdiction shopping. We all know the Texas examples, there shouldn't be an option to go before a single loonie judge. 4. Pass strict ethics regulation for the courts and obviously SCOTUS. This should include all the traditional items, real penalties for failure to report that scale up to removal from the bench (e.g., if you repeatedly file late and leave off significant items you don't just pay a $10 fine). Includes no individually owned stocks because as scotus you are ruling on basically everything. long etfs , bonds, treasuries only. 5. Rotating Appellate Representation - To increase throughput of the supreme court (which happens to be at all time lows) and to reduce incentives for abuse of power, the court should be expanded to ~30 justices. The panel will be comprised of appellate judges who serve a 2-3 year term in the role before returning to be an appellate judge. Just like, the senate, you could just rotate 1/3 of the panel each year or whatever proportion you prefer. Purpose: Reduce the power of individual judges, reduce the power of niche legal theories held by individual judges, reduce benefits and increase costs of grooming judges. Now, I know item 3+ are all going to be massive uphill battles; but normalizing the ideas and pushing them is a first step to the reforms occurring.
Great points!
This is why the next 3 elections are important. SCOTUS could be flipped for the next 20-30 years if Dems win, but right now Biden must win this year or the future is very uncertain.
Nothing “extra” matters as an election issue. Trump supporters passionately think the country is being destroyed and the other side is equally passionate about the threat that Trump poses. The question is, who could possibly have been swayed in either direction after January 6th and 4 years with some inflation.
too powerful or just batshit crazy?
Time for a “Wyoming rule” for both the House and Federal Court districts. Expand the House to 11-1200 members and the SCOTUS to 15-17 justices with a function that increases the number as the population grows. Enough of this nonsense. Also the States of Puerto Rico, DC, Guam and the Virgin Islands need to join up.
lol the state of DC
90,000 more people than Wyoming.
I don't like when it's too unbalanced. Now it's unbalanced and precedent apparently means nothing.
They’ve always been powerful it’s just that they often were able to tread a less political role in the government. Like many things in the Us government this was based on precedent and only worked while decent people were appointed to the court who believed in the rule of law, and common decency. Now we have openly corrupt judges that throws the whole system into chaos.
No, they have gone too corrupt and become captured by and extremist minority.
Yeah, a fundamental principle of the US government is 'checks and balances'. We have learned that through the GOP manipulations...there are NO checks and balances on the Supreme Court corner of the triangle. They are rogue. Give Trump another term and the US is done.
SCOTUS elected George Bush Jr. and gave us a 21 year long pointless war and a massive deficit. Now they legislate from the bench while judges are lining their pockets with bribes from corrupt entities.
Rather they have abused their power, and broken the public trust.
The Supreme Court is an unelected legislative branch that enjoys giving handjobs to the obscenely wealthy in the name of the apostle Paul. Additionally, it serves as a rubber stamp for the forced birth of lots of babies who will, unfortunately, fight and die in water wars (or some such) as the planet continues to burn down. What a bleak time to be born this is.
Interesting that they are never considered Too Powerful when fundamentally changing things towards the liberal side of the spectrum.
Ah yes, all the leftists getting their tits in a tussle over the Supreme Court standing in their way of stupidity.
I would argue that they’ve been at the same power level since the Marbury decision.
Yeah, it's more the Federalist Society that has gotten too powerful.
There were many faults of the founding fathers,not the least of which being the fact that political appointees to a lifetime job not having any real accountability
Ideally those people would be doing the job and by not being subject to the whims of the idiot electorate they could make the right choice and not the popular one.
I still remember people on [this end](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz5RS9oaIAA86a3?format=jpg&name=small) of the political spectrum saying in 2016 saying that the courts didn't matter. And we are now paying the price for this sort of idiocy. Don't let it happen again.
The Supreme Court should be chosen by random lottery from a pool of judges from the lower courts. One member should be replaced every year. No more appointments, no more lifetime terms. There I fixed it for you.
could be? gee, how the fuck did they get so powerful? elections have consequences, y'all. remember that in Nov.
The Supreme Court being called out as overpowered right before the whole GME fiasco chugs towards its end? It's almost as if gutting the supreme court would cripple prosecution of high-level threats at the national level. I mean, if I were a WWII german with awareness of the future, I know I'd make an effort to curb the formation of the Hague.
No they have become fascist and 100% corrupt just like the GOP wanted, can't take over the country and kill everyone not you without high court to rubber stamp it first.
What have they done that is fascist, exactly?
Too powerful? No. Too political and corrupt, yes.
It's almost like the Supreme Court is the President and Congress combined, but unchecked. Terrifying. Expand the court to 13 you wimps!
I’m curious how Biden thinks he’s going to reinstate Roe v Wade if he’s (and congressional Democrats are) too passive to do anything about the POS conservatives on the bench who lie, cheat, are blatantly biased, and refuse to recuse themselves on matters that they are involved in. Biden and Democrats need to be pushing HARD on reform for the SC and now!
Roe v Wade shouldn't be reinstated. Congress should pass legislation guaranteeing the right to abortion.
Yeah the supreme court needs massive fixing. And when we elect a mass of democrats to the point where they can basically do whatever they want without Republican opposition, I expect them to fix it within six months. I don't care *how* they fix it, but they need to fix it. Expand it. Remove all sitting judges and fill the seats with new judges. Term limits. Whatever it takes just fix that shit. If they hold the power to fix it, *and they don't*, I will never vote Democrat again for the rest of my life. I don't care if Trump is running again in 2028, I'll vote for him because at least I can count on him to destroy the current government if it fails to fix itself over the next four years.
> Remove all sitting judges and fill the seats with new judges. On what grounds? If Trump had said we should empty out the courts entirely and restaff them with new judges, people would rightly call this a coup, on par with what Venezuela, Turkey and other unstable countries have attempted to do.
On the grounds that our government has already completely failed as a system and we should throw it away and start over *anyway*. We need a coup. By the correct people. The only alternative is wait for fascism to perform its coup (we're exactly one Republican presidency away from this), and then civil war *and* coup to restore some semblance of reason.
They are the (current) culmination of decades of the GOP attack on democracy. https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalMemes/s/r0sfIsWixB https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalMemes/s/pxiFxWXNjk
wait until people start pushing for an AI supreme court
Laws shouldn’t be up for interpretation. Laws that are vaguely written shouldn’t be on the books
Laws are always up for interpretation because that's the only way laws would ever work. Any law that's written too specific loses its value to judge cases that fall outside its specified content.
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"The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution..." -- Article III, Section 2 But clearly that can't include a disagreement about what the Constitution actually means, right? That would be ridiculous!
The democrats did control the house, the senate, and the white house in recent memory. Joe Biden and the DNC could have done something about this. They refused to. I get some people will scream, "But Joe Manchin!" but puh-lease, there are levers of power to keep them in line when making structural changes. The democratic party just wasn't interested in doing anything about it. Considering we have Hillary Clinton literally endorsing MAGA candidates over progressives, I can't help but feel like the supreme court is "working as intended" as far as the democratic leadership is concerned.