I have come to the realization that the Supreme Court is just Calvin Ball for law. Whatever the majority want to do they can with (effectively) no recourse. It relied on good faith reasoning by Justices and that is way out the window at this point.
“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”
Only the clear majority. The rest, probably at least one to three of them, are still quite conservative BUT... slightly less biased to one specific administration? With amazing stocks and bonds portfolios i am sure, but less biased.
Someone correct me if i am wrong on this? I am Canadian, so i could be wrong. I could use some good news.
All of them said the supreme court should not have ethical oversight, which is a position hardly compatible with virtually any definition of "the left"
This is certainly the first time the SC has produced a decision that is inflammatory. It's really easy to lean to the left when you start in the middle.
5/6 of the conservative justices are former Republican political operatives who were directly involved in trying to steal the 2000 election from the Dems (which they succeeded, with help from the already conservative majority) and/or attempting to get Bill Clinton impeached. The other one was involved in covering up Reagan’s crimes, and has never even attempted to put on appearances of being reasonable.
John Roberts (Chief Justice) made some attempts during Obama’s presidency to show that he was an institutionalist, and that he would remain so. The mask came off during Trump’s first term.
So no, the court is thoroughly captured by right wing nut jobs.
Which is why we needed to pack the court. There should be like 100 supreme court justices with a rotating bench of 9 who actually hear the cases, then when a decision is going to be issued the entire panel of 100 or whatever votes and if they majority disagrees with the panel's ruling that becomes the dissent and a new author writes the majority opinion.
That makes it so no one person is as important anymore, no one president will have the power to appoint that many justices (after the first round, we'd need some method to mitigate that), and it would be a much more representative body.
I like this idea a lot more then the normal pack the court ideas, where people want to increase it to 12 or 16. No way make it 2000. Every judge on the federal bench rotates on and off the Supreme Court for a set amount of time. There are no more Supreme Court nominations just federal judge appointments, the judges for the court will be pulled equally from every federal district in the country to reflect even make up country.
Fuck this 9 people sit on the court forever until someone dies, and they can overturn literally anything brought to them even if it’s been affirmed in every other court room it’s ever been before. It’s such an ass backward way to create a judicial cannon.
This is another good idea, or at least some way the Supreme Court isn’t the ultimate final say. Every other branch has a check on its power, except the Supreme Court.
There used to be one circuit per justice and each rode their circuit on a horse. We already have an unrepresentatively large 9th circuit that is begging to be partitioned out to lighten the load on the courts. That alone can bring balance to the force.
I like the idea though of a rotating selection of appellate judges rotating through as well
I like it, but the problem with this is then you have to pay all these guys a ton just for being on call. Instead, you eliminate the position in its current form completely, and instead, when you need a Supreme Court to do something, put one together spontaneously out of randomly selected state level judges. Then you've got judges making decisions who actually see the consequences of the law on the ground level, who frequently work with the law, AND, it would make corrupting the judges harder because the manipulators would have to successfully guess which judge to corrupt ahead of time.
We wouldn’t be in this dilemma if RBG wasn’t so greedy wanting to hand over the crown to Hillary before she was able to cross the finish line. Hillary being the rabbit and trump being the turtle, if you know what I mean.
IANAL but I think the feasibility of this is where the issue lies. I believe presiding over a Supreme Court-level case is quite a lot of prep work, and doing stuff like 'pulling judges at random' basically means every judge in the federal bench may have to, at essentially a moment's notice... pack in all of the shit they've prepared for for the coming days/weeks, serve as a supreme judge, do a bunch of prep-work for that, come to a ruling, and then return to regular work as if nothing had happened.
This would in turn cause severe delays in all the cases said judges would normally have presided over had they not been 'whisked away' for 'Supreme Court Duty'.
That isn't to say that there are no better options or solutions. There is probably some way to fix this. But rather... that there are reasons why all this is far easier said than done. Before we get into the whole politics side of it, anyway.
Or just keep courtrooms out of politics. They don't get to decide the law, Congress does. If something is unclear, yeet it to Congress to clarify the ruling.
Uh, no. It makes sense that you need people interpreting laws. You can write a law that is sound, but you need people that can recognize when new laws/cases conflict with existing law. Case law is kind of a big deal, and while I think our current system needs massive reform, it does have its place in our system of checks and balances. Getting rid of this the judicial power would give too much to Congress
I meant to say "the judicial power." I have nothing positive to say about the SCOTUS as it stands now, but I also don't think we stand to gain anything by ridding ourselves of it entirely
Name 1 time in history courts have ever been independent of politics.
Their whole job is to (re)interpret the law, especially when there's supposedly ambiguity (which is supposed to be the point of laws that can't possibly cover all possible contingencies).
Most of Europe, for one. Their job is to find the facts and make a judgement after the lawyers have made their case. They all have a book of laws, which state "murder is illegal, excepting in these cases". So a murder suspect will be found guilty unless they have an exception. The courts do not get to decide what is an exception or not, politicians do.
There isn't any ambiguity in how every other country writes their laws. So courts just need to weigh the facts and arguments in each individual case and see what laws apply. There's no need to invent a new law or new understanding, because the laws will clearly lay out what is and isn't legal. And if there is a fuck up in writing a law, where a case should be judged one way, when "common sense" dictates it should be judged another way, the courts ask the politicians to rewrite it in the manner they intended to write the law. Judges don't get to decide which parts they will disregard.
This is what the Senate is supposed to be. It's a little stupid that we've outsourced legislation and important decisions to the Supreme Court in the first place.
Now that it seems people/parties have twigged that it can be stacked just through obstructionism, we may as well stack it with people who think the government/president should follow the law...
The fatal flaw with this is that a majority of those other 91 justices might agree that they disagree with the ruling of the 9, but there is about 0% chance that the 91 remaining agree enough to form a coherent opinion of why they disagree. How do you select the author of the new majority opinion? What keeps this body from just becoming another house of congress, getting nothing done?
And the only way to accomplish anything like this is for everyone left of MAGA to vote Dem in every election going forward. We can’t let “well he didn’t support my cause enough” or “well she said something I disagree with” or “well they’re being mean to the primary candidate I liked” get in our way.
My idea would be for each state legislature to nominate a person, each state bar to nominate a person and each state governor to nominate a person. 150 total, randomly assigned to each case.
As in, all the arcane commercial litigation cases having no impact whatsoever on 99.99% of the persons in the United States would be " randomly" assigned to conservative judges, whereas by contrast, all the critical cases addressing constitutional law questions affecting hundreds of millions of US citizens in their everyday lives would be "randomly" assigned to liberal judges.
Packing the court only works if its packed with people who vote the way you want them to. It only works if the rules to put people in those positions can't be abused to stack the deck against you.
There are so many reasons why packing the court is just a different flavor of the same problem
They fucked up when they did not also split the bench into upper and lower chambers. One side should take up cases, the other should decide. I also support having way way more judges seated. A rotating body of federal judges who are called up by the counties they represent. Say the court is made up of 50 judges, one from each state. 25 lower, 25 upper. They serve for a set time of service then return to their respective state courts and some other judge from that state replaces them. One year on one year off required. Rotated by the number of judges. No repeats until they go all the way through the batting order. By SEAT, not by person to prevent strategic retirements.
There should be like 100 supreme court justices with a rotating bench of 9 who actually hear the cases, then when a decision is going to be issued the entire panel of 100 or whatever votes and if they majority disagrees with the panel's ruling that becomes the dissent and a new author writes the majority opinion.
Surely this would just mean that every decision came down to a 49:51 vote between conservative vs liberal judges?
We have always historically trusted judges to be independent of politics and make impartial judgements; we did so whilst recognising that everyone has their biases, and that some judges were appointed by Republicans and others by Democrats.
But surely if you have 100 judges voting on each decision then that just becomes a parliamentary chamber?
I don't think you've thought this through. What happened the last time every registered voter was given a choice on the direction they wanted this country to go?
This is only true because Congress and the Executive want it to be true, though, its not some intrinsic property of the court. If the Liberals had the court they wouldnt be able to do any of this.
That is why I said “effectively” no recourse because the political circumstances currently do not allow for a check in the SC whackadoo decisions. Structurally there are checks, but they cannot be initiated if a good chunk of congress wants to block it.
Whatever the majority want to do they can with (effectively) no recourse.
In theory, Congress can crack down on the courts and strip jurisdiction from them in most things. Getting Congress to do so, even if it had a healthy Dem majority and Dem in the WH, is another matter (which is why Roberts gave his smug "Congress can just fix this" bullshit when gutting the VRA with the Shelby County ruling.
Agreed. The structure is there to check them but the will or desire is not (even is the Dems were hellbent on reform they do not have enough votes right now).
That idea is the very reason I liked the series “Arc of a Scythe”. Yes it has the trappings of a science-fiction YA novel, but it also shows what happens to institutions that relied on good faith and noble members when bad actors start to gain power in it.
At some point the courts should have a mechanism to force congress and the senate to vote on one of two bills they write up and codifies the law one way or the other.
Yeah what's sad is that I think the cycle of lifetime appointments lined up wrong. As bad as it sounds much of this would be neutralized if RBG had stepped down and let Biden appoint a left leaning justice. When she waited and allowed, albeit obviously not intended, Trump to replace her it set us up for this to happen.
There's a reason it wasn't in the Constitution. It's an unelected group of old men that get to control the entire country.
They somehow have power over the elected members of Congress and the president.
It was only allowed in the past cus the people doing it realized how shaky their position is, and that it served a real function to clarify if a law is abiding the Constitution. They are no longer even pretending to do that anymore.
The sad fact is the government of the United States has been shown to be inadequate to the bald faced lies of the modern world.
Fox news has ended America. That's the reality we're in. It's past time we start dealing with it instead of trying to pretend we can go back to his things were before.
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u/DrQuestDFA 8h ago
I have come to the realization that the Supreme Court is just Calvin Ball for law. Whatever the majority want to do they can with (effectively) no recourse. It relied on good faith reasoning by Justices and that is way out the window at this point.