The reason Merrick Garland is not a SCOTUS Justice is that the Senate is a political body with power over the confirmation process. There is a significant difference.
If anyone has politicized the Supreme Court it’s the Democrats. Democratic appointees have voted in lockstep with each other and with the Democratic Party’s preferred policies far more than have the Republican appointees.
Liberal Supreme Court justices vote in lockstep, not the conservative justices
Not really surprising, since the Republicans tend to appoint judges who promise to be strict constitutionalists, while the Democrats have appointed judges based on other qualities such as picking someone for a ‘Latina’ perspective, and always picking people who pass litmus tests for specific Democrat policies.
When you choose strict constitutionalists, then you advocate for things that aren’t constitutional as Republicans sometimes do, you shouldn’t be surprised when the judges disagree with you, even if they are on the same political side. But if you choose judges based on their positions on specific issues of the day rather than adherence to the constitution, they are much more likely to vote your way and to vote together.
It’s not the fault of Democrats that Republicans are bad at picking judges. And it’s a joke that the Republican judges are “strict constitutionalists”. That’s a convenient fiction, but they still just find ways to rationalize voting for their preferred outcome. We see it again and again. And we’ll continue to see it as long as SCOTUS is just another political branch.
How about this for a solution. Expand SCOTUS to 18 seats, provisioned as 6 left, 6 right, and 6 moderate/independent.
Each case is then heard by a random selection of 9 that isn’t determined until the case is submitted for certification.
That way no one can count on the current balance to work for or against them.
This is true, but if we agree to this we’re agreeing that occasionally cases will be argued by a fully ideologically stacked court. I don’t find that acceptable, I don’t think anybody who thinks about it for long would find it acceptable.
I would favor packing out the court to mitigate Mitch McConnell’s treachery, and then term-limit justices to something like 18 years, and make it a law that the Senate must confirm in the same year that a Justice is nominated.
Like when they overturned Obamacare
Or Roe v. Wade?
The court is more conservative now but it is not a political arm.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg would agree that SCOTUS is not a partisan institution.
What we need to do is start winning more elections.
Impeaching sitting justices for no good reason is probably going to lose you elections and even more seats on the court.
Packing the court will probably do the same.
You should look up what happened when FDR tried to pack the court.
No President would ever pick either of those names even if that was the person they would have nominated in the first place. The branches of government jealously guard their prerogatives.
The Republicans used to say something similar when the court was mostly liberal.
If you get enough justices on the supreme court every president will get a nomination every year or two and each nomination will stop being such a political bloodsport. This would make the chief justice a lot more powerful but it would also make the confirmation process a lot easier.
Some people have suggested 27 justices. https://time.com/5338689/supreme-court-packing/
You’re right, the Court began to uphold Roosevelt’s agenda.
High school teachers like to say that Court-packing was a bridge too far for Roosevelt to cross, but the bottom line is that it was successful in cowing the SCOTUS of Roosevelt’s day.
The credible threat of Court-packing could also be used to subdue Roberts et al and prevent them from doing anything stupid.
It could, but it would take several things to line up correctly, the most important and obvious being that RBG lives until noon of 1/20/21 and that a Democrat wins the POTUS race next year.
Next up would be for the senate to flip blue next year or in 2022 at the latest. Once those are all in place both RBG and Breyer should retire upon confirmation of their replacements. After that would be hoping for a vacancy due to a conservative justice leaving the court, presumably Thomas. Also on the list is hoping that Roberts continues to care more about the good of the country as a whole rather than the good of the Republican party.
The Republican courtB(or at least one of the GOP justices) may well have recognized that overturning either of those probably would be giving the Democrats their greatest election issue in decades.
So Roberts upheld Obamacare in 2012 because he thought that it would tip the election to the Democrats even more?
If he’s going to follow the winds of populism then he’s not a very good partisan.
No doubt the court is more conservative than it has been in a long time.
So was the court partisan when it was mostly liberal?
Just focus on winning more elections. That’s how power is allocated in a democracy.
I think there are a couple things the SCOTUS has that Congress does not- they can’t just do stuff because they want to- cases have to filter all the way up to them through the legal system before they can rule on them. This means that the law, both statutory and precedent has to be ambiguous enough about the case to require a decision.
Second, they publish their rationale(s) for and against any given decision.
This means that in general, the SCOTUS is more constrained in a lot of ways than the other branches of government.
So they’re not able to just overturn a court decision willy-nilly; a case has to make it to them that couldn’t be decided in the lower courts, which usually means there’s a particularly sticky legal issue involved, and when they do make a decision, they have to (or customarily do) publish their reasoning in the decision, as well as a dissent telling why the disagreeing justices disagreed.
To me, this would be to powerfully confounding factors against the SCOTUS being a political body- it’s not like the President or McConnell can demand they overturn something and actually realistically expect compliance.
RBG is in the hospital with some kind of infection.
I wish her a speedy and full recovery. The future of our country and possibly humanity as a whole depends on her survival for the next several months.
We have to keep her on her feet until Trump is gone. If we have to do a Weekend at Bernie’s then so be it.
Ginsburg, Breyer and Alito are at the age where Covid could very well knock them out, if they contract it.
If the Democrats take the Senate, that will make 1/3/2021 rather than 1/20/2021 the date to circle on the calendar.
We’re in the clear; this past February 13 was the deadline.
Or is that just for when it benefits Republicans?