I agree with the idea of expanding the number of justices on the court. You’ve heard of the experiment where if you fill a large jar with jelly beans and ask 100 people how many there are, maybe they are within a 50% range. But ask 10,000 people and they come within 1%. IOW, there is intelligence in numbers. I’m just not sure what the number should be. Twenty-seven seems a bit excessive at first blush, but I guess it’s doable.
I thought I was reading it. What did I not read about the fdr situation that makes my responses unresponsive? I think we might disagree on how the future plays out. I don’t think the court is as easily influenced as you think.
I am not just trying to achieve “wisdom of the masses” I am trying to make each individual nomination and appointment politically inconsequential.
Yes, I understand that. My silence on that aspect was an implicit indication that I don’t think it should be politicized in that manner.
No, it’s misguided to think that you must hold power in order to enforce rational and just rules that should apply equally to everyone. The refusal to hold a vote on Garland “in an election year” and the blatant hypocrisy in ramming through a vote on a third Trump nominee in literally the final weeks before a presidential election is precisely why the Supreme Court is so shamefully divided and delegitimized, and why McConnell and many of his ilk are regarded as so utterly unprincipled. The only reason this is happening is that it’s now the accepted norm that the party that appoints a Supreme Court justice “owns” him or her, and the appointee is expected to vote according to party doctrine. In any other country this would be regarded as an insane perversion of the constitutionally mandated separation of powers. That’s what’s really misguided.
You sure about that?
Yes, I’m sure. There are various reasons for rulings not being absolutely 100% consistently along party lines, but they’re so damn predictable in general that the SCOTUS is a laughingstock if it pretends to be a politically independent judiciary. Even your own supposed counterexamples are rulings that are split along political/ideological lines, but with a conservative justice unexpectedly venturing over to the other side. Yes, it happens, but it doesn’t change the big picture.
I do believe that John Roberts is genuinely concerned about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and that this accounts for his seemingly becoming the new swing vote on the Court. But there’s only so much that one man can do against a deeply entrenched partisanship. I have the impression that Roberts despises Kavanaugh in particular, and what this kind of appointment does to his court and his legacy, but there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.
It’s Republican Politics. It shouldn’t be the way the country is run. There was a time when a person could say “At long last have you left no sense of decency?” to a Senator and not be laughed out of the room.
So I show you several significant cases that didn’t go the way your statement would predict but you still maintain that your statement is true?
OK I guess I can’t argue with that.sort of logic.
Can’t really argue with that but then again I am one of those who long for the olden days, when people had good moral codes, and a handshake sealed the deal.
I do think you are in LaLa land if you think that only happens with the Republicans though.
Yeah, I hear that a lot when talking about the shitty way Republicans conduct themselves. Feel free to inform me about the racists Democrats were 80 years ago, or how, when they actually held hearings and voted on Reagan’s SCOTUS nomination, that they were big meanies.
:sigh: neither do I, you only show all that you continue to miss all the conditionals I mentioned. If the Court decides to disable progressive legislation the backlash will come, and from the Republicans that remain too.
It actually favors what I’ve been saying, consider the DACA decision, what happened there is clear to me and others.
DACA is a program that many republicans support too. A politicized court would had noticed that sending the republican congress critters and the orange swamp thing to the election campaign failing miserably to explain away why they supported the asinine case to dismantle it, would had been more disastrous for the electoral chances of many Republicans.
Several Republicans also were glad about the Bostock ruling too:
I suspect congressional Republicans feel the same way about the DACA case. The worst thing that can happen to congressional republicans is if the Court allows Trump to rescind the deferred action policy. Then the ball falls in Congress’s lap. And they are petrified of taking a position on difficult topics. Ditto for NFIB v. Sebelius in 2012. There really was no backup plan. Congress is all too happy for the courts, or the administrative state, to make the big decisions.
Point being that, I do think that many Republicans in power remain there because a lot of them really are fearful about what would happen to their careers if they have to make decisions that are not liked by the troglodyte faction from the right that do vote. I do think that some right wingers in the court do make rulings that are not in a vacuum. They are aware of how disastrous it would be for the Republicans in the future if they give the troglodyte faction everything that they want. Specially on election years.
Well shit, if the ACA, DACA, gay rights and all that other shit is going to be protected by both conservative and liberal justices on the supreme court, then this whole fight over SCOTUS seems kinda overblown.
Personally I think those decisions were made on sound legal principles and the legal philosophy of the justices makes a difference because they are appointed for life which insulates them from political pressure. Hell I can reverse engineer why every decision since marbury v madison was the result of cynical political calculation rather than legal principles.
Again? The Republican party was the anti-slavery party and the Democratic party was the pro-slavery in the civil war.
It was the Republicans who did the ass kicking in the civil war.
And it is the Republicans who are catering to the Confederates now.
I didn’t see in @Little_Nemo’s post where he said that the Republicans got their asses kicked, but the Confederates.
It seems that, once again, it needs to be explained that when the Democrats chose to support civil rights, the Republicans picked up those white voters who were against them.
It’s odd that people remember something so clearly from 150 years ago, but cannot remember what happened only 50 years ago.
And then forget it again 5 minutes later.
They can’t remember what happened 4 years ago.
I do think it is a horrible thing that the left side was the leader in the civil rights era. It’s a testament to the good men on the left and the evil men on the right in that era.
But I don’t see civil rights as being the core ideology of the left/democratic party. In my (admittedly biased) view the primary goal of the Democratic party has always been to increase personal rights. Most of the time this is a good thing but not always as some rights cause harm to others.
In the 1800s the Democratic party was pushing for the “right” to own slaves and harm Black people. They argued Republicans were evil and trying to hurt those living in the South. They justified their actions by dehumanizing people with dark skin.
And now in the current day the Democratic party pushes for the “right” to end pregnancies before birth and harm the unborn. And again they argue Republicans are evil and trying to hurt women. And again they justify it by dehumanizing the very young.
It doesn’t seem like the Democratic party has changed much since the Civil War to me.
Not really, a lot of suffering and needless waste will be the result.
While I would like an end result where the Republican brand becomes more toxic, it is bad that many will suffer in the meantime.
I’d rather if the republican party became a better party.
I’m trying to imagine what you guys would say if a conservative president was stuck with a liberal court, then promised to pack the court with conservative justices unless the current ones started voting more conservatively? And then got his way and the court started handing down more conservative judgements.
Would you consider that smart politics? A clever use of power? Or would you call it subversion of justice or extortion and demand impeachment?
I think we all know the answer to that. What’s cool for a Democrat to do is illegal when done by Republicans.