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A democracy shouldn't have a single person in power who wasn't elected.
The United States needs to discard the "republic" part of our democratic republic.
And in order for these changes to happen, rich men in positions of power will need to die.
...of natural causes so that their entrenched power can be passed on to future generations.
Only six of them deserve to be replaced, but they should also spend the rest of their lives in prison.
Clean it all out and start over again.
Did you even read the article?
term limits is a start
The time was a decade 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.
It’s so adorable that you think Democrats might ever actually do anything if they got power. Enjoy your cookie.
A boy can dream, can't he?
You do not need a constitutional amendment. Until 1911; part of a Supreme Court Justice's job was "riding circuit", to serve on more local circuit courts. This practice was established and abolished by Congress. Congress has the existing constitutional authority to assign Justices to circuit courts.
There is also a recently proposed TERM act, which would promote Justices to senior Justices after 18 years. A senior Justice is still a Justice, but would not actively decide cases unless there was a shortage of active Justices.
Congress could also impeach some of the current Justices. Either for partisan political reasons; perjury at their confirmation; or blatant corruption.
they should work with Republicans
Have....have you not been paying attention?
Republicans want power. They don't care how they get it. They will negotiate in bad faith to get it.
You must have missed it, but Harris spent her valuable time mostly courting Republicans for a reason. Not Ds (millions sat this one out), not independents, but Rs.
Why would she does this, when we all know she had to court independents to win? It's a mathematical necessity.
Do you know why? I wonder if there's any connection to the billion dollars she raised (at least)? Hmmmm, it's a mystery.
That's why you need to add 4 young, Liberal justices in thir 40s (who would serve for 40+ years with a lifetime appointment) before starting to work with Republicans. Make it so that the alternative to not working together is much worse for them.
Well said, and great idea.
One author is in the federalist society (the reason SC is corrupt)...
And the other seems to believe international laws shouldn't exist and Israel is totally cool...
They want us to "accept" it's corrupt and somehow do away with the entire notion of a SC and replace it with some "populist rule".
Similarly, progressives are increasingly converging on the idea of both expanding and “disempowering” federal courts. Attentive to the reality that the supreme court especially is not and rarely has been their friend, left-leaning advocates are finding ways to empower ordinary people, trading the hollow hope of judicial power for the promise of popular rule.
To label as “nihilists” those sketching an alternate, more democratic future is, in other words, not only mistaken but outright bizarre. Rather than adhere to the same institutionalist strategies that helped our current crisis, reformers must insist on remaking institutions like the US supreme court so that Americans don’t have to suffer future decades of oligarchy-facilitating rule that makes a parody of the democracy they were promised.
In Trump’s second term, the Republican-appointed majority on the supreme court has brought their institution to the brink of illegitimacy. Far from pulling it back from the edge, our goal has to be to push it off.
They're right wingers trying to hijack progressivism to destroy the SC after it changes all the laws to how they want, and before the left can use it as a weapon to change the laws back.
I'd love to say people won't be naive enough to fall for this, but I don't want to lie
I think this is a misread of the article. They don't seem to be suggesting any actual solution, and only mention "populist rule" in passing with no specifics.
But they do seem to be blaming the left for not doing anything about the problem. And I thought it was funny how at the top they were like "even liberals like Roberts"
The United States needs a completely new constitutional process, to stop idolizing as political gurus people who lived 300 years ago and did a great job for their time, but that's over. In Europe, some countries, during that same period, had dozens of constitutions and nothing bad happened about it.
Oh no, our Conservatives have been prepping for a new Constitutional Convention, and already have a playbook planned to ratfuck that.
The process for that is that 2/3 of states need to call for a constitutional convention to start it. When in session, everything is fair game to be amended. The rules for that are not codified in advance and created by the members themselves. And whatever comes out of that must be approved by 3/4 of the states (currently 38) in order to be binding on everyone.
But , by my calculations, 182 million people live in the 12 most populous states. Since the US population in all states is 339 million, that means that a new constitution can be ratified by states with only 43% of the population, then bind everyone to it.
There is no doubt in my mind that this will result in those states who did not vote for the new constitution seceding.
Either I haven't explained myself well, or you haven't understood me. I'm not talking about following any set path; I'm talking about throwing everything out the window and starting from scratch.
It is clear that establishing rules that apply in California and Texas requires consensus and compromise, but even federalism needs to be rethought, if you start from where you are today, you'll never get very far.
At the first continental congress, or whatever it was called, there were no rules to go on. You'd have to go back there.
Unfortunately, there's no process for that. Single judges can be removed via impeachment, but being a partisan hack is not a high crime.
Similarly, nothing can happen with Conservatives controlling the House and Senate.
A core problem is that impeachment votes have become a team popularity contest, with the details of charges, innocence, guilt, etc. being irrelevant except for theatrics.
Oh, they know...
https://fedsoc.org/bio/ryan-doerfler
They want to trick people into dissolving the SC before the left gains control and can replace the problematic ones while taking steps to prevent this from happening again.
It's like a kid that walks up and slaps a peer, then immediately says "no tag backs" and says the game is over..
The federalist society got what it wants out of the SC, and now they want people to stop abusing it before we can undo what they just did.
I don't know why googling authors isn't the norm when billionaires own all the media companies. If you don't you'll never notice clear hypocrites like Ryan Doerfler.
Alas, the Constitution does little to protect against incompetent voters who refuse to act to protect their democracy.
It's not incompetence, that would imply people tried to prevent this. It's apathy. If "did not vote" has been a candidate:
It’s time to accept that the US ~~supreme court~~ is illegitimate and must be replaced | Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn
Fixed the title for you.
