this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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[–] xmunk 133 points 3 months ago (3 children)

President Harris could and should get ten new picks.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Amy Covid Barrett and Beer Kavanaugh are completely illegitimate

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

ACB is not nearly as insane as I thought. Thomas and Roberts need to be kicked out first.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

Alito is worse than Roberts.

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[–] candyman337 52 points 3 months ago (1 children)

She should expand the courts

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

She should announce that as her plan to pressure the passage of Biden's plan

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well, she has immunity for official acts…

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If she provides the direction directly to the person/people who are to follow that instruction, how is that now (now) a Constitutional order?

Asking theoretically, but I really don't know how that wouldnt be Constitutional. We already kill US citizens abroad...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Just type it up on the White House letterhead and you’re probably good to go.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 3 months ago (2 children)

This is just my personal view but I don’t think we should have one Supreme Court. Every case should get a random assortment of 9 judges drawn from the several circuit courts and even the most minor of conflicts of interest should mean you’re ineligible for the random selection.

And if the downside of that is we get constant conflicting precedents due to ideological judges, then why have a Supreme Court at all? If it’s Calvinball anyway, just switch to a parliamentary system.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is a much better idea. There should still be term limits, though.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I like your idea, but I think they’d manage to corrupt it somehow. Like picking jury members, they’d want a say over which judges get the case because politics, not because justice or impartiality.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Exactly. Appellants would separately escalate a dozen similar cases, and only proceed with those cases that draw a favorable panel.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is one of the exact reforms I've been talking about wanting for years at this point. 18 years is a perfect tenure for someone as influential as a Supreme Court Justice, and giving every president 2 nominations is a good number to keep the values of the Supreme Court in line with those of the public.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

1 every 2 years.

How do we handle deaths?

Edit: seems the median tenure is currently just over 15 years. Mode may well be 5 years.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If it’s Thomas or Alito, we handle it by laughing and arrest everyone who bribed them.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

Why wait 'til they die?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

also early retirements, stonewalling via the senate as with Merrick Garland… guaranteed gaming the system with those would become much more common. So yeah it’s much much more complicated than just saying one every two years.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Most likely you'd have to allow the sitting president to appoint an acting justice to serve out the remainder of that justice's term. Yeah we'd still have the problem of RBG dying under Trump and giving us a 6-3 conservative majority, but if she only had a few years left on her term when she died the damage would at least be limited.

As for what McConnell did to Garland, having term endings scheduled would make that a lot harder. If their terms are staggered such that they always end 1 year and 3 years into each president's term it destroys the argument that it's too close to an election and the people should get to decide who makes the appointment. They'd be forced to outright deny the nominee and let the president try again. That's much harder to maintain.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago

Think there should be something in there about if the senate doesn’t go through with the hearing that it’s “implied consent”. Not that Mitch McConnell bs.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 months ago (7 children)

Restore the court’s eroded legitimacy? Two justices at a time per term? Even if Harris wins and gets two in her first term and manages to replace two conservative justices with two liberal justices, that would still leave the court at 5/4 in the Conservatives favor. That would mean at least four more years of conservative zealotry handed down by the court.

The problem needs to be fixed as soon as possible. This is a good first step, or would have been 10 or 20 years ago but it isn't enough right now. Biden needs to add members to the court as well as adding term limits. Or to be more realistic, Harris will need to do it. There's no way a Republican House or 50/50 Senate is going to let Biden do anything in the next 5 months.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Or to be more realistic, Harris will need to do it.

Or to be even more realistic, Congress needs to.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

replace two conservative justices with two liberal justices, that would still leave the court at 5/4 in the Conservatives favor.

Not sure how you get that. The current 6/3 conservative majority would become a 5/4 liberal majority.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Americans, take a look at how the European Court of Justice is staffed:

The Court of Justice consists of 27 Judges who are assisted by 11 Advocates-General. The Judges and Advocates-General are appointed by common accord of the governments of the member states[7] and hold office for a renewable term of six years. The treaties require that they are chosen from legal experts whose independence is "beyond doubt" and who possess the qualifications required for appointment to the highest judicial offices in their respective countries or who are of recognised competence.[7] In practice, each member state nominates a judge whose nomination is then ratified by all other member states.[8]

The Court can sit in plenary session, as a Grand Chamber of fifteen judges (including the president and vice-president), or in chambers of three or five judges. Plenary sittings are now very rare, and the court mostly sits in chambers of three or five judges.[19] Each chamber elects its own president who is elected for a term of three years in the case of the five-judge chambers or one year in the case of three-judge chambers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Court_of_Justice

Not to mention that there are more than one "supreme courts" with different types of expertise.

There is the General Court, the Civil Service Tribunal, and of course very importantly the European Court of Human Rights.

Spread the hazard of hyper-concentration as thin as possible.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The issue for the United States is that the system was designed from the start to guarantee unending political gridlock. Then SCOTUS is the only pressure relief valve to allow legal changes to take place. Thus it has become the focal point for all political energy.

No system can produce an independent court when all of the population is intensely focused on that court as an outlet for political change.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Would a term limit by itself ensure that each president gets two appointments, if justices time their retirements strategically to preserve their faction on the court?

Suppose all the conservative justices retire en bloc as soon as a Republican wins the presidency, resetting the terms for all their seats to another 18 years. As long as another Republican wins within the next 18 years and the new justices continue the tactic, they can prevent a Democrat from replacing any of them indefinitely.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think you could set it up in case of a vacancy (retirement/resignation /impeachment/death) someone would be nominated to fill that slot but it's term limit would still be the same as when the person vacated, so if they were 10 years in, whoever it would be could only serve 8 more years

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

That wouldn’t really be a term limit so much as a fixed term, then—and for partial/suffect terms, it might conflict with the original intention that the Supreme Court be immune from short-term political intrigues. (And of course it would also give some presidents more than two appointments per term.)

Another option might be to appoint one justice strictly every two years, with no fixed term and no fixed number of justices. Then the number of justices would fluctuate around half the number of years in the average term—so nine justices with an average term of 18 years, twelve justices with an average term of 24 years, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

A country of +330M habitants could and should have more than 9 Supreme Court justices, also the ninth Circuit should have been splitted long ago

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And the 5th circuit should be launched into orbit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

But orbits decay. Even if they burn up on re-entry, I don’t want to risk inhaling vaporized fascist bootlicker. That shit causes cancer.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Oh, I meant a solar grazing orbit. With multiple gravity assists from Venus.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

That’s more like it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

That's an orbit worth pondering.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Huh. Did not realize that was considered an orbit. #themoreyouknow

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[–] VirtualOdour 10 points 3 months ago

This is s great idea, not to extreme that it's impossible but powerful enough to make a real difference for the better

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (6 children)

There isn't a plan.

A plan would list the steps necessary to enact Biden's wishlist, but so far I have not seen a plan for how to actually enact any of the changes he has proposed. It will require constitutional amendments, which is impossible thanks to the undemocratic electoral process enshrined by the Supreme Court. Without amendments literally any legislation can just be struck down by the Court.

Instead of using the unlimited power the Court just granted him, he's just wasting time on a wishlist that won't happen.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

A sitting president is opening discussing changing an equal branch of government. He's using the bully pulpit to introduce and normalize the idea to an entire nation. That itself is valuable, and where this has to start.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

We would need an amendment for term limits, but we don't actually need term limits. The size of the court is set by Congress, not the Constitution, and there is no requirement that it be a fixed number.

So, we can just give every president two appointments, in their first and third year in each term. Life terms, per the constitution, but any who die or retire are not replaced.

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[–] anticurrent 2 points 3 months ago

This could bring abortion every few times to try and overturn previous ruling. and keep it as the single most important issue at every election while they keep screwing the working class. rinse and repeat

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