It’s time to accept that the US supreme court is illegitimate and must be replaced | Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn
We need to remake the US high court so Americans don’t suffer future decades of oligarchy-facilitating rule
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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?
We have two pro capitalist parties in the US.
What's interesting is that during the great depression they knew that economic collapse would lead to a socialist revolution, and so put in the work to "inoculate" the US against it. They would give us a little socialism, so that we wouldn't go all in. Medicare, social security, minimum wage, all these things came out of that philosophy. And it fucking worked. The US had the single most robust economy in human history from the 40s all the way through to the 1970s. When, in response to the civil rights movement, white southerners actively voted against their own self interest KNOWINGLY, so that black people wouldn't get a fair share of the pie. Nixon began the week to work to dismantle the New Deal, and we're basically living with the shattered broken corpse of the best social program we were ever going to get with votes.
The US had the single most robust economy in human history from the 40s all the way through to the 1970s.
This was mostly due to being basically the only industrial economy to not be bombed to bits during WW2. We had the entire world reliant on US manufacturing
That certainly helped. But it lasted nearly 30 years and didn't start to crumble until the Nixon administration inventivized big businesses to begin hoarding wealth. By just about any metric you look at, the US economy during those decades was the best any economy had ever been. And in 1973 it took a nose dive, and the only metric that continued upward was lifespan but that's turning around now too.
It took most of the world that long to really rebuild. It took the UK nearly a decade to end rationing after the war for example.
You don't have to convince me the Republicans ruined the great economy that gave us, that's a given.
I'm more so getting at the reason we did so well. Having social security doesn't suddenly mean your economy is globally dominant
The thing is, without the massive economic boon provided by those social programs, the US really wouldn't have excelled the way it did. Wealth distribution was at an all time high. Laborers were becoming wealthy by going to work. Bell Labs was employing people to sit around and dream up problems to solve. The wealthiest 1% had about 8% of the wealth. Exports started steadily declining in the 1950's, but the amount of new production was only going up. In 1966, exports declined nearly 2 billion dollars, and money spent building new factories was nearly 10 billion dollars.
Americans were consuming more of their own products. Post war production carried the US through about 1955, but to say that was the only reason the US did so well for 30 years after WW2 is really reductive and just plain wrong. It helped, but it's far from the only cause and stopped being a factor pretty quick.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The real problem is Democrats giving rubber-stamp confirmations to conservative Supreme Court justices.
Each of the 13 justices gets a 13 year term, each justice could serve up to two terms, consecutive or not,
Absolutely not. You NEED it to be one term, because judges should never have to rely on approval of others for their jobs. The only reason they should be able to be removed after appointment is a severe ethics violation.
I agree almost entirely with what youre saying but let's not pretend like RGB not stopping down would have mattered. Republicans had already shown that they were willing to just leave the seat vacant for a year unless it was their guy nominating.
RGB should have stepped down early in Obama's second term, when Democrats still held a majority in the Senate....
Well said, and great idea.
I think we should have age limits on any political position, including that of judges. 70 is about the limit where physical and mental acuity is pretty likely to be slipping away, but having the energies to struggle through confrontations is the basis of being a judge. Character is important, but that means nothing if the judge in question becomes a Merrick Garland.
So both term and age limits, to help prevent the stratification of power and politics.
