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A system that appoints supreme constitutional judges for life and without even halfway serious democratic checks and balances seems to me the perfect recipe for disaster and corruption. But hey, I'm from Europe, so what do I know... ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Hey. You can't just use common sense when it comes to our Judicial System. That would be too logical. What next? You gonna ask that our Supreme Court Justices have Ethics Rules!?
What is this world coming to?
It's more a symptom of the FPTP voting system
Europe has viable parties outside the two most popular in any given election cycle, so partisan loyalty is less of a threat to the application of removal proceedings or other punitive measures.
Article V of the the Constitution.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artV-1/ALDE_00000507/#
Amending the Constitution was intended to be much more usable, but over half the country doesn't vote.
Yeah, the drafters of our constitution really fucked up in that regard.
I'd attempt to solve the problem by creating an independent judicial review board entirely separate from the US govt. similar to other "professional" professions. Let these judges go up for review every 5 years and if they are found to be in breach of conduct, remove them from the bench.
Also, rework how they get to the bench in the first place. Of course the SC is going to be politically motivated. They only get their seats because one of the two big parties literally puts them there. Impartiality is really hard to claim when you owe your entire existence as a SC judge to a giant money machine.
The whole point of a lifetime appointment is that they can abandon all political concerns once they're in the SCOTUS - so they don't have to be political. And I've seen that happen - while they obviously stay conservative or progressive, they tend to drift away from an alignment with the parties - with exceptions, obviously.
But, as with all other branches of the US government, it's becoming clear that we've exited the era of being able to trust our leadership to support the Constitution and represent the people.
(For me, it wasn't even Trump that snapped me out of that mindset. It was when they were talking about outlawing congressional insider trading. One of the Republicans said, out loud and in public, that the notion of prohibiting congressional sick trading was off the table, because it was a core part of the job. He said something like, "half of us wouldn't be here" - as though that was a bad thing.)
Lifetime appointments mean they don't owe anyone shit. They have nothing to gain by being loyal to the party that appointed them. There are better ways to accomplish the same thing, but it's at least one facet of how the court works that seems to do what it's supposed to.
So instead they're loyal to their party's billionaire donors
Which is why Congress has the power to remove them if they fail to meet "good behavior". But Congress is also abdicating their responsibility to democracy.
I don't necessarily think the founders fucked up. It's important that the court be free from political influence when deciding cases so I think they had the right idea. I'm not necessarily opposed to lifetime appointments. Where I think there's a lot of room for improvement is the nomination and confirmation process. It's entirely political, contentious, and has produced a few lousy justices in recent years.
This idea of one party only appointing conservatives and the other only appointing liberals and both sides hating the other's appointments is what's fucked up. What could be interesting is a bipartisan Congressional nominating committee that produces candidates that are at least palatable to both sides. Let's say there's a 2/3 majority requirement for the committee to nominate someone. They could produce a list of several candidates and the president nominates one of them. Basically take this process away from partisan NGOs and give it to a bipartisan group of elected representatives.
Yeah, the drafters of our constitution really fucked up in that regard.
The thing is, the drafters of the constitution didnt mean for the supreme Court to be as powerful as it is today. There is nothing in the constitution that even grants them the power of judicial review. They just interpreted that they inherently had that power, and we've gone along with it for the last hundred years.
According to the drafters, separating the judicial branch from the executive was a way to inhibit veto power and to prevent the executive from reshaping laws that have been passed by Congress. There only other function was to handle cases between two states, and to oversee an impeachment trial in the Senate.
Joe Biden worries that the “extreme” US supreme court, dominated by rightwing justices, cannot be relied upon to uphold the rule of law.
If he really worries about that, and is not just scaring people to vote for him, then he has a responsibility to enlarge the court.
I'd argue this should have been the immediate response to Mitch McConnell blocking nominees half a term away from an election, but if the court can't uphold the rule of law, it should be fixed (and expansion seems like the obvious solution) or replaced.
The procedural question on this one is whether he could shrink the court to boot say... Thomas, then expand it again to replace him with someone less obviously corrupt. Republicans fail to confirm a replacement? We'll shrink the court a little more. Obviously, this won't happen, but I'm interested to know if it's possible.
Shrinking it (through established legal channels) is impeachment and removal which has a high bar. Enlarging it is just passing a law, which is only hard because the senate has a policy (not a law) to effectively not pass laws without supermajorities. The latter could be done with a simple majority of politicians with a spine.
I’d argue this should have been the immediate response to Mitch McConnell blocking nominees half a term away from an election
Honestly I feel like that needed a civil war level response, that really should not have been allowed/normalized, regardless of which party initiated the block.
whether he could shrink the court to boot say… Thomas, then expand it again to replace him
I couldn't agree to that, that's way too manipulative and dishonors the previous selections from previous presidents.
I would expect him to just expand the court by two seats, if he was going to try to do something along these lines.
I am concerned about the obvious concerning things as well. Y'all should make me your leader.
Then maybe he should have packed the court with some good judges
Would have had to nuke the filibuster to make it where they could pack the court. That required yes votes from all Democratic senators (only because not a single fucking Republican would vote for it), and Manchin and Sinema refused to do it.
Nothing Biden could have done. We needed more Democrats in Senate seats. That's the game though. Republicans do their best to make us feel like voting doesn't matter, then we don't turn up - making it easier for Republicans to say the government doesn't work.
It’s just that easy ™️
I don't think he's exactly even capable of doing so. SCOTUS judges have to retire or die, and then vacant seats have to get confirmed by the Senate, and no self-respecting Republican Supreme Court justice would die while in office. Expanding the number of justices is also extremely unlikely to happen, and also, relevantly, not really in Joe's hands.
At least they're finally starting to get a clue that "They go low, we go high" is bullshit
To me, as a non-American, the most baffling thing is that everyone in the States just assumes, and accepts, that these appointed justices are going to rule according to some political bias.
That's not the way it works in the rest of the free world. Judges are, by definition, trusted to be impartial interpreters of the law/constitution. That's their role.
I live in Canada, and I'm vaguely familiar with some of the names of our Supreme Court justices, but I certainly don't know their political leanings, nor do I care. Nor does any Canadian I know. That's the way it's supposed to be.
So as far as I can see, the problem isn't that SCOTUS is stacked with Republicans, nor that it can be. The problem is that everyone seems to assume that this is the way it should be.
No, we don't. Along with Citizens United, EVERY American with a brain and open eyes is aware these are the absolute most important problems, and they lead to endgame checkmate authoritarianism.
First of all, the Overton Window in America is skewed heavily right. So our centrist Democratic leaders are center right, our Republicans are what most countries would call regressive, extremist, authoritarian right wing, or even fascists.
See, the problem is rightwing extremism has been on a campaign since the civil rights era to take control of the country and undo the progress made since the 1960s.
They installed right wing media. They cut education and tampered with curricula. They gerrymandered. They instituted voter suppression. Their strategy culminated in the Federalist Society influencing the selection of Gorsuch and installation of right wing judges during the Trump administration.
The thing you have to know if you ever want to try and stop extremist, authoritarian, right wing regressives is that they do not hold the same ideals and morals as you and I. They do not play from the same playbook or follow the same rulebook.
They believe that "might makes right," that any ends justify the means, that rules are enacted to protect them and their in group and punish their selected out group. They believe in many cases that their cause is justified by God.
And so any justice who adheres to such zealous principles will see no issue with finding a way to rule in the favor of their side. They may even go so far as to rule with weak or minimal justification. They will be a lot less likely to rule in an unbiased fashion.
My current opinion is that, so far, we have only seen rulings that fall into the "finding a way" category.
I think these justices will incrementally push the envelope on what they can get away with over the upcoming decades.
“I think these justices will incrementally push the envelope on what they can get away with over the upcoming decades.”
I feel like we have already turned the corner of openly ruling along party lines as well as unrepentant corruption.
That's not the way it works in the rest of the free world. Judges are, by definition, trusted to be impartial interpreters of the law/constitution. That's their role.
The problem is that these judges are appointed through a political process, as about any government worker apparently is. This way you get a hyper politicized country, where even the job of librarian is no longer just a job, but an oppointment that should be strictly controlled.
It's absolutely baffling.