No, the number of justices was first set at 9 in the 1860s, and as I’ve pointed out, Congress has been setting the number of judges on the Supreme Court for as long as the Supreme Court has existed.
No, they couldn’t, because the Constitution still specifies that an appointment is for life except in case of impeachment. The only way to remove them is to impeach them or reduce the size of the Court at the point of their retirement.
Article III, Section 3; “The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behavior.”
The Republicans who are still running for office or otherwise still competing for positions in the party are bankrolled by a handful of powerful interests, with a peculiar nexus between oligarchy, kleptocracy, and religion.
Flake and Corker aren’t really independent; they’re thinking of their financial and political afterlife, which probably means maintaining access to the corridors of power after their political careers officially come to an end. They might not like bein shown the door by the Trump cult, but they know that if they want fat lobbying income, then that’s the game they gotta play.
Any attempt to pack the court, either by Republicans or Democrats, will result in popular fury.
Partisanship is already spiralling out of control. Do you really want to fan that fire?
If Trump decided that the court needed 12 justices and proceeded to pick three new, highly conservative justices, or President Booker decided to do it with liberal justices, I think the result would be violence in the streets. It would be perceived as a de-facto coup. A Supreme court packed with partisans could essentially give the ruling party free reign to do whatever they wanted. There are umbras and emanations galore that can be used to hand-wave away all sorts of constitutional protections if the SC really wanted to do it.
When the financial collapse happens, there will be no more partisanship; we will have one side dominating politics and that will be the reckoning. And we will have to insist on justice - nothing less.
This country is screwed; it just doesn’t know it yet.
But most of the people writing now, especially those under 50, will see their life savings mostly wiped out. Once that happens, there will be a new reality.
This country is heading towards a Constitutional crisis one way or the other. It’s inevitable with as anti-democratic the GOP has become. I’d rather it be liberals with the power of law behind them when that crisis comes rather than the Nazis; how about you?
That does not grant congress the right to determine the size of the supreme court.
As it happens congress set it at nine and no one has challenged it but I still see nowhere in the constitution where the notion of “separate but equal” for the three branches of government, which was the central theme in its creation, is neutered by letting one branch gut another branch as you suggest here.
The check and balance for the judiciary is in the senate’s power to confirm or impeach.
Congress drawing arbitrary lines is not in the constitution for the Supreme Court.
The necessary-and-proper clause, along with the interstate commerce clause, form the lion’s share of the justification for almost everything Congress does, but no, it doesn’t make it all-powerful. The Founders put it there for the specific purpose of making sure that Congress wasn’t limited by the fact that an essential function for stable government hadn’t been specifically enumerated in the Constitution, much like the Ninth and Tenth Amendments do for the states and the people.
Congress has the power to set the size of the Supreme Court because maintaining a stable and functional judiciary is necessary and proper to execute most of their enumerated powers.
Your stubborn insistence that Congress doesn’t have the power to do what it’s been doing the entire time this Constitution has been in effect is lacking in any Constitutional merit.
No, they don’t because the constitution does not say so. They can setup inferior courts but they cannot nerf another branch of government because that would be a STUPID thing to do if you were a founding father trying to create a government of checks and balances.
Over time, the current slave-era Constitution will become extinct, because it needs to. It was good for its time, but current generations will have to remake America in the image of a country that actually embraces the values of democracy and equality for all people, not just a hypocritical group of wealthy white men.
Today’s shit show was symptomatic - one of many symptoms - that American democracy is withering on the vine, a sick and diseased relic from the past. We cling to the hope that we can return to our normal of Kennedy vs Nixon and Mondale vs Reagan, and center left Democrats versus center right Republicans. But those days are gone.
Except there is no “tradition” of it being nine. It started at six. It went to five at one point. It’s been as large as ten. The only thing that keeps it set at nine is an act of Congress that no one has challenged their authority to pass since 1789 - at which time the people who wrote the Constitution could have, say, not passed that law if they didn’t intend for the Congress they created and were now sitting in to not have that power.