Who’s said this? The court is already illegitimate. Expanding won’t make it legitimate. But it will make it more progressive, and less corrupt, which is absolutely needed right now.
I don’t see how you make that leap. Expending it seems like it would just make it more political, like a third house of Congress.
Funnier still is how only a Republican administration has the right to nominate a supreme court judge in a federal election year.
No size will make an individual appointment ‘meaningless’. You would wind up with a Supreme Court split down the middle. Put 50 people on the court, and you’ll probably wind up with 25 liberals and 25 conservatives, and every pick from then on could ‘swing’ the court.
For example, there are 50 Senators, and yet every single Senate seat is critical. Even the House, with 435 seats, often flips on just a half-dozen seats.
And don’t forget, with 21 people on the court vacancies will open much more often, and many presidents woild get multiple picks. How would you feel about your 21 seat court if Republicans held the Presidency and Senate for 8 years and managed to replace 5 or 6 Democrats with Republicans, making the court 16-5 in favor of Republicans? What then? Ask the next Democratic administration to pack it to 35?
There is a solution: Democrats could make their policies more palatable to the middle of the country so they have a better chance of winning both the Presidency and the Senate. Then they can change the Supreme Court the old-fashioned way.
If Trump appoints a conservative and then loses, The Democrats will likely get to replace Breyer. Then if they can hang on and wait until Clarence Thomas is gone, they can flip a conservative seat back to the left, and restore the balance on the court. Roberts is voting with the left on a lot of issues already.
Both sides have the ‘right’ to do it. The difference is that the Republicans control the Senate. Had the Democrats controlled the Senate in 2016, Merrick Garland would be on the court. But they didn’t, so they cried foul when the Republicans stopped them. This year the Republicans still have the Senate, or the Democrats would do the same thime thing to them.
Sure, Republicans are hypocrites for saying that a judge shouldn’t be appointed in an election year, then doing just that. But the Democrats are equally hypocritical in that they said there was nothing wrong with an election-year appointment in 2016 while now claiming that doing so in 2020 would be tantamount to ‘stealing’ a seat.
So both sides are hypocritical. Welcome to politics. The difference is that the Republicans have the power to do it, and the Democrats don’t.
The precedent that McConnell established is that, if you have the power, you use it, regardless of what tradition says. If the Constitution doesn’t expressly forbid it, then do it. That’s the McConnell doctrine, and there’s no reason why Democrats can’t do the same if they have the power. Whether that’s good for the country to keep going down that road is a different question.
I don’t think the Democrats were being hypocritical; Mitch McConnell’s idea had no basis in law or tradition.
Only because the conservatives in Congress wouldn’t let the bill out of committee. If the Democrats were to try it in 2021 and had both houses no committee would be against the move.
The Court started out with 6 members, then 7, 9, and 10, before The Judiciary Act of 1869 fixed it at 9. There is nothing sacred about the number.
Expanding the Court has some actual practical advantages. The Court has for years been reducing the number of cases decided. Reading between the lines, that’s probably because decisions have grown so time-consuming to research and so complicated to write that the justices can only do fewer. Spreading the load out might mean that more cases could be decided. However, since everything must be discussed by the whole body there are practical limits on the Court’s size. Twenty-seven is a ludicrous number for getting real work done. Eleven or even thirteen should be workable.
In political terms, of course the Democrats should expand the Court if the Republicans push through a nomination. It’s pure scorched earth from here on out until the Republicans are destroyed as a party.
It’s not hypocritical to hold someone to rules that they declared, even if you don’t agree with them yourself.
It’s like the whole designated hitter controversy. If a coach think that the designated hitter rule is a bad idea, does that mean that they can’t use it?
I guess we’ll never know whether Democrats would have pulled that bullshit stunt if McConnell didn’t decide to make up his own new rules. But since it was McConnell who opened that can of worms, I’m quite comfortable putting the blame squarely on him and the GOP.
Or, if people rebel at the notion of packing the court for political advantage, you could find yourselves losing the Senate in 2022 and out of power again in 2024. The other side always gets a vote.
I don’t think the American people would look kindly on using shenanigans to gain power when you couldn’t do it at the ballot box. It’s probably the single best argument against the Republicans ramming through a justice now (it’ll hurt them in November), but packjng the court would be seen as much worse, since it’s essentially a loophole in the constitution to get around the clear intent of the constitution, which is that the court should be non-political.
I’m not sure it would even pass muster with the Supreme Court. For example, Ruth Bader Ginsberg was strongly against court packing. Don’t be surprised if the other liberal justices are opposed as well, as it would be diluting their power.
2010 turned out badly for the democrats specifically because people stayed home because they didn’t see the dems doing enough.
They saw the Dems constantly trying to reach out in bipartisanship, and constantly getting hammered for it.
If the Democrats actually take actions that the voters like, rather than allowing the Republicans to obstruct them at every turn, then they will do much better at the polls.
They didn’t go vote for the Republicans, but they didn’t come out and vote for the Democrats either. They were not really motivated to vote for a party that seemed more intent on getting along with Republicans than fixing all the problems that Republicans had caused.
Republicans have never had any problem with that, why would you think that Democrats would?
What Americans want is a government that works, that governs and that addresses their needs. How that sausage is made only matters to policy wonks and internet commentators (like ourselves).
The Republicans have been sabotaging the functions of the government, and blaming the Democrats. And most people, not paying nearly as much attention as people like us, go along with it. “Well, they are the ones in power, and things aren’t going too well.” Not understanding the nuance of exactly how the Republicans are actually at fault for nearly all of their complaints.
Trump blamed Biden for not having instituted a mask mandate. They don’t take governing seriously, they just look for gotcha points.
If the Democrats take the presidency, the senate, and the house, then they have gained power precisely at the ballot box, and your noted concern is completely invalid.
The supreme court has nothing to do with it. The Constitution specifically gives congress the power to determine the number of justices for SCOTUS and for all the lower courts. What power do you think that SCOTUS has to “pass muster”?
RBG may have been against it, but she’d even more be against all of her life’s work being undone.
It already is this. It’s just another political branch, right now held by the GOP. The Democrats should make sure it’s held by them, if they have the power to do so.
And her dying wish was “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.” How’s that working out?
The alternative is a GOP SCOTUS for the next decade, if not more. McConnell has proven that scorched earth tactics for power don’t always backfire. The Democrats should try their own version of this. If they don’t, the ACA goes away, legal abortion goes away, every progressive priority will probably be overturned in the SCOTUS, and basically they have no chance of getting anything they want to get done. A 6-3 court could overturn every single progressive bill that’s passed.
I am proposing that we make the institution less political by making the appointments so numerous that no single appointment is so significant. The current court is the result of a naked display of political power. From Merrick Garland to the removal of the filibuster for supreme court seats. Conservatives will say it goes back to Bork. In any event, every appointment is so high stakes that this was bound to happen.
In what way would simply packing the court when Democrats have power be any worse than what the Republicans have done. I am proposing an even split.
I am not allocating anything.
Once the first 27 are seated, we proceed to follow the normal constitutional rules for how justices are appointed. Only you will likely have a new appointment every year so these appointments won’t be such high stakes events. So every president is liable to appoint 4 or 5 justices per term.
Was the court illegitimate when it ruled in favor of gay marriage? Was it illegitimate when it upheld the ACA/ Was it illegitimate when it upheld the argument that sexual identity = sex? Or is it only illegitimate when the liberal justices are in the minority?
Lifetime appointments are different. You can’t whip votes of a lifetime appointee very well.
How is that worse than what we have now? Every administration would get 4 or 5 appointments and the court would drift left and right over time.
The Republicans are not winning the senate because the democrats are unpalatable to the middle of the country. The Republicans are winning senate seats because wyoming gets as many senators as california. The presidency seems to move back and forth between republican and democrat fairly regularly. The last president was a democrat, the one before him republican, the one before him a democrat and the one before him a republican. Don’t foool yourself into thinking that everyone else in the world actually agrees with you and some slim minority of extremist liberals are voting in the likes of obama (and would vote him in again if he was eligible).
I doubt that is how it plays out. After the bullshit with merrick garland and removing the filibuster, If they replace rbg with a conservative, the democrats will pack the court if there is not a better option. Naked displays of political power beget naked displays of political power.
It’s not much of a controversy, it will become universal, so will robot umpires.
They would have had to win at the ballot box to pull this off.
[quote] It’s probably the single best argument against the Republicans ramming through a justice now (it’ll hurt them in November), but packjng the court would be seen as much worse, since it’s essentially a loophole in the constitution to get around the clear intent of the constitution, which is that the court should be non-political.
I’m not sure it would even pass muster with the Supreme Court. For example, Ruth Bader Ginsberg was strongly against court packing. Don’t be surprised if the other liberal justices are opposed as well, as it would be diluting their power.
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I don’t know many democrats who think that we should obey the unwritten rules when the other side does not. I doubt a single blue district turns red over it.
The raw power grabbing they see in trump is rallying the republican base. No reason to think that similar shitfuckery from the democrats wouldn’t rally the democrat base.
That’s hearsay, dying declaration sure but still hearsay. I knew her vicariously through her husband and she was highly principled but she had personal opinions. The constitution doesn’t really care about her personal opinions and she would be the first person to tell you that.
I doubt that.
The court has been much less partisan than the representative branches of government
We know this because the ACA is still intact
We know this because it is now illegal for employers to discriminate based on sexual identity/preference.
The liberals have been in the minority since the 90s. It’s been illegitimate since McConnell refused to consider and hold a vote on Garland.
The ACA will be overturned in a matter of months, barring something very unusual. Likely do will many other established liberal priorities and protections. The idea of trusting that things will work out okay with McConnell and Trump at the helm is just ludicrous. They’re winning and will keep winning unless the Democrats both won the upcoming election AND use their new power to strengthen their hand, in the form of a larger court, new states, robust voting rights, and more, specifically aimed at helping Democrats win elections and enable Democratic policy priorities.
I’d rather the Democrats use the threat of court packing to force a compromise that might actually work. Any “compromise” would not be constitutionally mandated of course - it would be a set of guidelines that would require some good faith to support it. I think Sanders tossed out an interesting idea a few years ago: an expanded number of total justices but only some of which serve at the same time; they’d rotate. Again, how you force people to abide by these rules, I don’t know. But clearly we’re past the time for reform. There needs to be an acknowledgement on both sides that we need an objective branch of government and that has to be the judiciary.
I continue to find this unfathomable. As long as Democratic and Republican presidents pick the nominees from a pool of liberal and conservative judges what difference does the number make? 14-13 is the same as 5-4.
There is a lot more uncertainty with a larger pool, and I do think more justices would make each one a bit less consequential. Just like how a single House swing district election isn’t as consequential as a single swing state Senate election.