All SCOTUS nominees a president puts forward are guaranteed a senate confirmation vote after 2 months.
A 60+ vote majority is required for immediate confirmation. 51 “No” votes are required to reject the nominee at any time during this process.
If nominee fails to reach a 60 vote majority, nomination can be either withdrawn or put on hold for up to 6 months, at which point a 55+ vote majority is required.
If nominee fails to reach a 55 vote majority, process can be repeated in another 6 months, at which point only 51 votes are required for confirmation. If this hasn’t occurred, the nomination gets thrown back to the president.
All SCOTUS terms are for 18 years, with no possibility of serving more than one term.
SCOTUS now has a constitutional maximum of 9 justices.
This preserves elements of the filibuster, but only as a delaying tactic, not a permanent stall. If this delays the confirmation period beyond a president’s term, tough noogies, unless the new president elects to keep the existing nomination and timer in place.
Not without a Constitutional amendment. Anytime the majority’s preferred nominee is getting filibustered, they’d just amend the rules again back down to 50 to get their preferred nominee through.
Somehow it’s become lost in the confusion that Garland wasn’t a Democratic choice. It was Orrin Hatch who suggested Garland as a nomination that Republicans would accept. Obama agreed to the compromise and nominated Garland. But then the Republicans refused to vote for Garland.
This shows that the Republicans won’t negotiate. They won’t accept merely winning; they have to have the Democrats lose. If the Democrats offer to give the Republicans what they asked for, the Republicans will refuse to take it.
Really, term limits for Justices would be the most sensible way to deal with this, though it would require a Constitutional amendment. Jeb Bush was proposing such an amendment during his Presidential run, so there’s at least some hope that it might be possible to get a bipartisan consensus for it. But then again, if we lived in an era where an idea being sensible and obvious was enough to get a bipartisan consensus for it, we wouldn’t be having this discussion…
I haven’t forgotten. That’s why I wrote “I suspect your side does not really want him on the SCOTUS that badly”.
In recent threads, there’s been much angry posting about how unfair it was that McConnell chose for the whole Senate in the Garland matter. In this case, Hatch does not speak for the whole Senate. If Obama had nominated someone like Gorsuch or Kavanaugh or a justice along those same lines, McConnell would have rushed to schedule a vote and the Republicans would have been delighted to give Obama a successful SCOTUS nomination.
Obama is a Democrat. Obama chose Garland. Therefore, Garland was a Democratic choice. If Obama didn’t want him, he should not have chosen him. But he did.
Yes, but it’s extremely clear that if Garland’s nomination had been put to a vote, he would have been confirmed overwhelmingly. This is why the Republican leadership refused to allow the vote.
The next time the Democrats win the Senate, they should follow the same standard.
Can you show your work there? The Senate had 54 Republicans at the time. I think it’s possible he could have been confirmed, but I think more likely not.
Some of them spoke glowingly of him during earlier confirmation hearings, but surely you realize it happens all the time that Senators change their minds about that when the person is up for a SCOTUS seat, no? Especially if it will tilt the balance of the court.
My own personal SCOTUS fantasy has Dems taking the House in 2018, Senate and White House in 2020, then adding two more seats to the Supreme Court as a fuck you to Mitch McConnell for blowing off Obama’s nominee.
The only problem is that I’m guessing it’s not that easy to change the size of the court, or Republicans probably would have tried already. I know FDR tried and was unsuccessful but I don’t know what majorities he had in Congress when he tried it.
I don’t. That’s my point. All these stupid “vote no on everything until Garland is on the bench” sort of ideas (and I see the OP’s fantasy in a similar light) from the Left are just idiotic, because your side doesn’t even really want Garland.
court packing and impeaching sitting justices are two of the more radical suggestions I’ve seen leftists make. I don’t think either would work out well for them, but … that’s just my opinion.
ETA: maybe we’ll get to the point where every time Congress and the Presidency are controlled by the same party they either purge SCOTUS of all opposing-party judges or increase the size again to the point that the opposing-party justices are a minority. That doesn’t sound like a good plan for the independence of the judiciary, but that seems to be where some Dems want to take things.
I’m “putting shade on” the OP’s idea that the country should go through all these wild machinations to, at least in part, get Garland seated. It would be stupid. One of the reasons is that Garland isn’t even really who the left wants on the bench. They want more activists like RBG or Kagan or Sotomayor.
If wanting Garland on the bench is a compromise, about politics, what point are you trying to make? It’s not an end to anyone on the left that I know. What satisfaction do you get out of “making a stand” on this kind of factoid?
I think the idea might be to vote no until we get political sense, but that will require much more than Garland. Preet maybe, Michael Moore, Michael Avenatti, it’s a new morning. They would be great on the court, esp today with all the prefascist grumblings going on. It might mean the R party needs to die. You are doing a great job by the way in promoting that.
Nope. Just needs a simple majority vote of both Houses. Last done in 1869. FDR had large majorities in both Houses when he proposed it, but couldn’t get the votes to make it happen.