As an Englishman I’m a great admirer of the American system of governance, the separation of powers. But I sometimes wonder if that separation is best served when two of the branches of government can nominate and appoint members of the third branch. Would it not be preferable to directly elect the Supreme Court just as the President and members of Congress are directly elected?
I can see the argument that this would inject politics into the process of selecting the justices but as we have seen recently politics is already there as large as life and twice as ugly. At least with direct election Presidents and Congressmen would be kept at arm’s length.
Is there some reason that the Founding Fathers didn’t quite separate the third branch in this way? And if so is that reason still compelling today?
Just a personal insight here, but the Judiciary is meant to act and operate on a fundamentally different basis from the other two branches. The Executive and Legislature are political bodies, proactive and dynamic, and so it makes sense for their basis to be popular and democratic, or at least through the lens of the States of the Union.
The Judiciary, however, is less political, ideally not political at all. It’s meant to interpret law on the basis of justice and fairness, through precedent, and not meant to innovate and create law. Even with the Judiciary laced with politics as it is, the reactive nature of its powers does keep it within certain behavioural limits.
Electing it would undermine that basis and make it overlap dangerously on the territory of the Legislature most of all. As said, judges are meant to interpret using precedent, but an elected judge may be tempted to innovate using popularity.
Fuck that shit. Some jobs require knowledge and experience. Some qualifications can’t be reasonably assessed by the general population. Atm, there’s a reasonable balance between the public choice and “working your way up the system”.
The judiciary should be as apolitical as possible. Most people agree that the increasing politicization of the court is a bad trend. Electing judges would make the problem even worse.
I think that idea would be as bad as electing the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These people should be chosen on the basis of their professional experience and knowledge not on how electable they are.
It’s bad enough that state and county judges are elected in most places. No, hell no, and fuck, no, to the election of any part of the Federal judiciary.
I wonder if Trump, like Taft, will enter the Supreme Court after he leaves office. There are no qualifications needed, but I’m sure he can get some instant legal training from a friendly college.
Getting the President to be a non-partisan role would probably be a better solution, it would solve this problem as well as a bunch of others. It was a good enough way to do things for George Washington. It should be good enough for us today.
No, but they should be limited to a single term of somewhere between 10-15 years. That way presidents wouldn’t feel compelled to select the youngest and most ideological judge that they can sneak past Congress by whatever means necessary.
For that matter, the Senate wasn’t elected directly until 1913. It was the House of Representatives that was the anomaly. Just about everything and everyone else, the president, treaties, amendments to the Constitution, admission of new states to the union, etc., was rather specifically NOT put in the hands of the people.
I doubt it. Taft was 64 when he was appointed to the Supreme Court and served for nine years, until his death in 1930. Trump is already the oldest person ever elected as President, at 70. He’ll be anywhere from 74 to 78 when he leaves office. And assuming it could be another four years after that when another Republican might be elected, Trump might well be in his eighties by that time, if he lives that long. I can’t see a future President nominating a candidate at such an advanced age or Congress approving a candidate that age when a new justice might have to be nominated all over again in a few short years.
Taft had gotten a law degree at the Cincinnati Law School (now the University of Cincinatti College of Law), passed the Ohio Bar, had been an assistant county prosecutor, was in private practice in Cincinnati, then an Ohio state judge, and then Solicitor General of the United States, and then was a judge on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals before McKinley named him Governor of the Philippines.
President Trump has no legal or judicial experience.
