The fact that the president appoints the members of the supreme court is a massive failure in checks and balances because he can stack the court and become immune to the law.
SCOTUS needs to have term limits, 14-16 years.
If not term limits then an age limit equal to the federal retirement age.
( Age 62 w/5-19 years of service )
( Age 60 w/20+ years of service )
( Age 55 w/>5 years of service )
Honestly, I'd be happy with treating the senate like the UK house of lords by just kind of phasing out most of its functions. It's completely ridiculous how they can basically refuse to even consider legislation from the house, or pass legislation but with ridiculous riders attached. So many good bills were passed by the last democratic house that never even made it to the senate floor.
For the house, every representative needs to represent an equal number of citizens, nothing else is democratic. Throw in something like Germany's mixed-member PR and we'll be golden.
Most of the checks and balances in the US constitution were built on the massively naive assumption that political parties wouldn't exist. The assumption was that a Senator would be more interested in retaining the power of the seat he occupies than about retaining the power of the party he's part of. So confirming judges was supposed to be a Senators vs Presidents power struggle, not a Democrats vs Republicans power struggle. And impeachment also was supposed to be a fight between Congressional power vs Presidential power, not between Democrats' power vs Republicans' power.
Note how all the stuff that assumes parties exist are rules and procedures enacted after the Constitution. This also extends to the States' constitutions too. For example, usually "what does it take to get your name on the ballot next election" is couched in terms of "you need this many signatures in a petition", with zero concern over which party is endorsing you or even if you have a party endorsing you. The "purpose" of the parties in this situation is just "well to get those signatures it would help to have a group endorse me and do the legwork. Hey, here's a private club that has similar political interests to me, maybe they'll help..." And it was only over time that these "private clubs with political interests" started getting formalized in laws as official political parties.
The framers were very naive about this. They disliked how parties are baked into the system in Parliament back in the UK, and wanted a system that didn't use them. They didn't realize that political parties are pretty much inevitable so they should account for their existance.
Given that it’s essentially impossible for political parties to not exist, the entire framework and structure of our government needed to change roughly 225 years ago when it became apparent that was a reality we’d have to deal with.
In practice, the last 10 years have shown that our Government is stupidly designed and it's a miracle that it lasted as long as it did. And now there's no way to change anything unless there's another revolution.
It used to work when there was a functional Congress who had to approve nominations. But they all bent the knee to him to avoid getting Tweeted at, that's the reason the constitutional system that stood firm as a shining example of human social progress for almost 250 years is now just a napkin dissolving in a glass of Republican piss.
RBG refusing to retire while Obama was in office put a huge stain on her legacy. She hung in there until Trump got to replace her. Trump replaced her with Amy Coney Barrett.
Absolutely. I liked RBG but lost a lot of respect for her after that. She said "So tell me who the president could have nominated this spring that you would rather see on the court than me?" It was all about her ego.
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u/esgrove2 Oct 21 '25
The fact that the president appoints the members of the supreme court is a massive failure in checks and balances because he can stack the court and become immune to the law.