People are worried that if one more Supreme Court vacancy comes up during Trump’s term, it could solidify a fascist majority on the Court for decades to come. But how worried do we really need to be?
The next time the Democrats have control of government, we can just increase the size of the Court and appoint however many new Justices are necessary to ensure a sane liberal majority. FDR tried this in 1937 and got slapped down, because people back then thought that SCOTUS should be above the fray of partisan politics.
But after Bush v. Gore and the theft of Merrick Garland’s seat by the scum, does anyone really believe in that fairy tale any more? Would anyone (other than Republicans) in today’s America have a problem with a naked power grab? Obviously the other side doesn’t, so why should we?
I haven’t seen much evidence that enough Democrats care enough about the courts to rock anybody’s boat. It’s one of those issues like guns where only one side really cares.
Going by the logic of this rant, Trump should nominate 20 new Justices this week. Then the next Dem can nominate 22 more. Then the next Rep can nominate 24. Soon the SC will have to meet in RFK.
Then the next time the Republicans get a chance they up it to 13? Better be safe and make it 15.
And so Dems at the next opportunity decide 21 is a nice number… and then the …
Court packing is great so long as my side gets to do it and the other side does not. I can justify it by realizing that it will only happen once since my side is on the verge of a permanent majority and there will never again be a president from the other side. :rolleyes: Or not.
A lot of ideas about various Constitutional Amendments get thrown around but setting a membership cap on the high court is one proposal I could support. Make the effective date 20 years in the future after the date of the last state’s ratification so it is far enough in advance that neither side can be certain which, if either, of the current parties will hold the reigns of power at the time.
Isn’t the filibuster obsolete? The GOP won’t push to repeal Obamacare “in regular order” because they know the resultant catastrophes would expose their stupidity. But when something important comes along — tax cuts for the super-rich — don’t you think they will exercise the Thermonuclear option in the Senate?
Let me go on record: If the Party of the American People ever regains 51% control from the Party of Kleptocrats, I do hope they “go Thermonuclear” and act to restore American Democracy for future generations.
But that’s a big If. The Kleptocrats are in control now, promoting voter suppression measures and so on to make their usurpations permanent. For our children and grandchildren “American Democracy” may just be a wistful memory.
There is the obvious objection that then the other side just does it the next time they come into power, and the whole thing gets unwieldy. But that could also be said of the tactic of refusing to even consider any nominations made by a President of the other party…eventually they could all die off and nobody would be left on the Court at all!
A better idea would be to put term limits on Justices, say ten or fifteen years. This was actually proposed by Jeb Bush during his brief Presidential campaign. But that would require a Constitutional amendment, which in practice requires bipartisan agreement, and if bipartisanism was still a thing, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Really my OP was more in the nature of a poll…after seven years of Mitch McConnell shitting all over the traditions of the Senate and facing no consequences from his voters, is there any liberal on this board starry-eyed enough to choose to abide by the Unwritten Rules of Fair Play, even at the cost of short-term political advantage?
Hold it- when’s the last time a majority of Democrats voted to confirm a Republican nominee to the Supreme Court?
You don’t know, do you? At the very least you’d have to do a little research. Which is fine, but it proves my point: the Democrats have been playing hardball on the Supreme Court a loooong time. The OP is either Uninformed or dishonest if he’s claiming the GOP started this fight. The Democrats decided in the EIGHTIES that conservatism alone was a valid reason to vote against a Supreme Court nominee. The Republicans took decades to fight back in kind.
If Robert Bork were alive, he could buy Merrick Garland a beer and tell him, “I know how you feel- sucks, huh?”
Yes, Merrick Garland feels like someone who skated on being impeached, removed, and disqualified (never mind criminally charged) for involvement in one of the greatest scandals in the history of the republic, and was then nevertheless retained on the federal payroll for most of the next 15 years.
Democrats need to win elections first, and I’ve seen no evidence that they’re capable of doing that on a regular basis yet. And while I would agree that Gerrymandering is a problem, if the Democrats would simply start competing in local races, they wouldn’t have nearly the problem they do now. When a party is facing possible extinction, that is not the time to be fantasizing about court packing.
The last time a party had that big of a majority was 1966, and that was a mirage as the Democratic Party had more divisions within itself than with the Republicans at the time.
There was no “theft” of a SCOUTS seat. But if the Dems think they can pack the court, per the OP, and get away with it, they should go ahead and do it. I wonder why no prominent Democrat is even remotely suggesting this be done? Must be that they just haven’t thought of it yet…
Blatant goalpost moving. Bork was an extremist, as well as having a personal history of unethical behavior. The Democrats were quite right to save the country from him, and they subsequently approved the next nominee. That’s not remotely analogous to what the GOP did, refusing to even consider ANY Democratic nominee. So which are you, uninformed or dishonest?
I believe, though I could be wrong, that enlarging the Court would only require a simple majority, whereas impeachment would require a two-thirds majority.
The design of our system was exceptionally democratic for 1789. But by 2017 standards, it sucks. We represent states in our upper house instead of people. We allow elected officials to choose which voters will vote for them with partisan gerrymandering. By 2050, if current urbanization and political demographic trends continue, 70% of the country will be represented by 30 Senators.We allow states to disenfranchise millions of their voters to try to win partisan advantage with felon disenfranchisement and voter ID laws. Most famously, of course, we allow a minority of citizens to install a President.
This is no way to operate a democracy in the twenty-first century. It’s great that we were first out of the gate, but we need to learn some lessons from the intervening two hundred and fifty years.
Unfortunately, the nature of a broken democracy is that you cannot fix it with democratic means. It’s possible, for example, that a 5-4 Supreme Court will bail us out from the gerrymandering problem (itself an anti-democratic fix from our royalist high court). But I wouldn’t count on it, and it won’t last anyway if the Republicans appoint another person who pretends to think that simple math is “sociological gobbledygook.”
All of this means American democracy is quite ill and the longer we wait the more desperate will become the extraordinary measures to fix it. Court packing, as radical as it would be, is probably not extraordinary enough. The only way we’re going to abolish the current structure of the Senate, kill partisan gerrymandering for good, abolish the electoral college, and create a right to vote enshrined in the Constitution is some kind of massive crisis (even more massive than having elected a fraudster moron to hold the nuclear codes).