I have a hard time seeing Thomas as the leader of the current court. He’s a right winger but he’s never been noted for having a forceful personality. And at 74, I question whether he has the energy to take over.
I think what we’re seeing is more the effect of somebody more recent like Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, or Barrett.
It’s Alito. He felt Roberts’ appointment pushed aside his own rightful place as Chief Justice.
But Thomas isn’t hesitant to push for stuff he wants. Remember his vote on the January 6th Committee access to records, despite his wife’s very active texts with Mark Meadows and others being contained therein. That was as blatant a disregard for conflict-of-interest issues as it gets. Jaw-dropping, really.
Even you must be aware that there is no toaster. Right?
I disliked Thomas less when he was nearly silent in oral arguments and rarely authored an opinion. Now that he is more active, all the crazy has been vomited out.
Thomas has always been highly conservative—something ‘the media’ neglected to emphasize over the more salacious story about the Anita Hill allegations and the shitty treatment that Hill got from senators on both sides of the aisle—and has clearly been biding his time. It is certainly the case now that the court is stuffed with ‘Conservatives’ like those mentioned about and Justice Alito who are willing to overturn decades of legal precedent to further their political views, and that Thomas has ‘found’ his voice but I’m not sure than any one of the justices is really the leader at this point, and Roberts as abrogated his responsibility as Chief Justice, although the way the Supreme Court is currently constituted he may not have a lot of control.
The idea that the solution is to end the Senate filibuster (which should be done anyway) and pack the court with enough ‘liberal’ justices to balance out is one of those expedient solutions that is likely to come around and bite the people advocating for it in the ass. Imagine a court that ends up packed with 11 or 13 justices, 9 of whom are conservative and all appointed for life; it would take multiple Democratic administrations to bring that back into balance. The real solution is to eliminate lifetime appointments and limit justices to one 10 or 12 year term each, with individual terms staggered such that no two term presidential administration could appoint more than 2 (not counting retirements or deaths).
Of course, that won’t happen because such a change would likely require a Constitutional amendment (or a creative reinterpretation of the meaning of ‘good behavior’) and is a moot point anyway because of the statistical likelihood that the GOP will win enough seats to take over the Senate in the 2022 mid-term elections, so there will be no action on either expanding the Supreme Court or fixing the fundament problem of lifetime appointments. Meanwhile, Justice Drunk Groper, Justice Handmaiden, Justice Hardcore Originalist, and Justice Death Penalty, will join Thomas in eviscerating many decades of legal precedent upon which much of the modern jurisprudence of personal rights stands while Roberts tends to his knitting.
Stranger
When you are currently being aggressively bitten in the face, there is little point in worrying about being bitten in the ass at some ill-defined point in the future.
So far as I’m aware, it takes no Constitutional amendment to pack the court with as many liberal justices as necessary to create a majority.
Worrying about what the Republicans might then do “in retaliation” if they got back in power seems silly to me when they are already doing their worst right now. The mindset that if we act reasonably they may respond in kind is what got us here in the first place.
You don’t worry about bringing bigger knifes to a knife fight because it will give your enemy to excuse to do the same, when your enemy is already armed with guns.
When was it that he rarely authored an opinion? Looks to me that he’s been a pretty active writer since he joined the court. (Seems to be writing a bit more now, but not a whole lot more.)
I’m not arguing that Democrats shouldn’t pack the court to ‘play nice’; my point is that expanding the Supreme Court in order to ‘pack’ it in favor of more liberal interpretations may have even more severe unintended consequences. The current size of the court is the result of a long line of machinations to favor one political interest over another (and hence gives lie to the notion that the Supreme Court is an apolitical arbiter) and making it larger gives even more opportunity to sway the court to one side where it can remain stuck for generations. Packing the court is not just an imperfect solution; it is a potentially fatal one for democracy. That so many rights have hinged on an few easily reversed decisions by the Supreme Court is a larger problem and one that is beyond the scope of the current exigency but grasping for a cure-all that doesn’t fundamentally cure anything is like putting a tourniquet around the patient’s neck to stop a head wound from bleeding.
Stranger
That is just being very naive about what the results will be coming of this decision.
From the Gizmodo link:
The decision technically places the responsibility for regulating emissions from the power sector into the hands of the legislative branch. In a well-functioning democracy, Congress would be able to pass laws that would then direct the EPA to regulate emissions and pollution through specific mechanisms. But as anyone who has been paying any attention at all to the state of national U.S. politics can tell you, climate action in Congress has been dead in the water for the past decade or more. This, experts say, was a core part of the plan of the special interests that brought this case forward.
“The Court is not naïve,” Graves said. “The majority knows that Republicans have blocked in Congress every major significant effort to mitigate climate change in the past few decades. They know that some of the same forces that are behind the amicus briefs [in this case] have been able to thwart Congress’s ability to craft new laws to address this.”
And the interests lining up behind this case are powerful.
The problem is is that I see legislation as being even more easily reversed. At least SCOTUS is supposed to give good reason before overturning precedent. Congress has no compunction there at all, they can reverse things just because it’s a different party in charge now.
It is definitely a fundament problem. 
No disrespect intended. You’re one of the smartest people here and one of my favorite posters. A typo, no doubt, but a meaningful one.
How on earth is it worse? It’s already stuck to one side, and will remain so for a generation.
If the Republicans get back in power and pack it the other way, that’s no worse than our current situation.
And if this takes us down a path to the Supreme Court doubling in size as each administration re-packs it and it becomes a joke as anything other than a rubber stamp for the politics of the current administration, that’s still better than the current situation.
If bipartisan Constitutional reform to create a sensible Court is impossible, we’re better off without any functional Court at all with its current ostensible role of “interpreting the Constitution” when that means imposing the theocratic will of the minority on the majority. Given the status quo, the fact that a strategy to disrupt things by packing the Court might eventually precipitate a Constitutional crisis with respect to the judicial branch seems like a feature, not a bug.
One barn is looking for its horse.
What I favor (assuming we get an actual majority) is starting the process on a Constitutional amendment to actually fix the court (how, precisely, to do that, I don’t yet know), and at the same time, pass a law that the court shall expand by one seat every month until such time as the amendment is passed.
I’ve always been a fan of the 18 year terms, long enough that the judges shouldn’t be beholden to politics, but no longer lifetime appointments.
And make the confirmation process less ambiguous. A president nominates a justice, and the Senate has say 90 days to vote against them, if not, they are seated.
Is voting on an issue when one has a personal interest grounds for impeachment? Not that Republican Congresspeople would do it.
In the traditional world of the Supreme Court, yes. But not now.
I would say it is grounds, but that there are too many Republicans in Congress for him to be found guilty.
Biden mentioned that packing the court is bone headed, presumably because the Republicans would pack it again when they next have a President.
I think that more than the horse has escaped.
Stranger
I agree with that. I think there are ways to change the Court to make it less partisan, but Court-packing isn’t a good one.
I have my doubts as to whether any sensible idea could be accomplished, however. I think people are going to be shocked at how aberrant and rogue this Court is going to be. Has already been.