Changing the number of Justices must be discussed as what it is: something that has happened more than once in our history—with no radical extreme scary results.
“Nine justices” is NOT established by the Constitution.
In 1891 there were nine Courts of Appeal (federal circuit courts) and nine Supreme Court Justices. There were six Justices until 1807 when the number was changed to seven; nine in 1837; and ten in 1863. The number went back to nine in 1869.
Nine Courts in 1891 and nine Justices.
But we now have thirteen federal Courts of Appeal.*
We should have thirteen Justices.
This is the type of discussion that should be promoted by the Biden Administration. There is nothing radical here.
“Nine” is not a Constitutional number and the number has changed as the nation has grown. The nation has grown to the point that “thirteen” is a more sensible and logical number of Justices.
With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens withthe information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’spolitical speech advances the corporation’s interest inmaking profits, and citizens can see whether elected offi-cials are “‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.” 540 U. S., at 259 (opinion of SCALIA, J.); see MCFL, supra, at 261. The First Amendment protects political speech;and disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way. This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.
I read an article a while back, I don’t remember where, but it outlined a very interesting worst case scenario for democracy.
The scenario was…….Trump comes into office in 2016, stops tweeting, stops the performative bullshit and becomes a good President. This bizarro world Trump actually has a healthcare plan and bipartisan solutions, and eventually he wins most of his detractors cover and starts hitting approval rates north of 70%. He wins his second term by a landslide and starts a movement to eliminate term limits, which is widely embraced. Then, and only then, does he start to turn up the heat on the pot of frogs and ease the country into authoritarianism. Democracy dies without a fight.
It’s the most ridiculous hypothetical ever, but the perspective was interesting.
If he were capable of doing any of that, or even thinking of any of it, would he have won the election? Certainly not with the voters he actually had in 2016.
Both chambers’ bills, Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 3, would:
• Ban drive-thru voting
• Ban 24-hour voting by setting time constraints
• Prevent county election officials from sending absentee ballot applications to any voter who has not requested one
• Require partisan poll watchers to be allowed “free movement” to observe election activities at polling sites and central vote counting areas
• Ban absentee ballot drop boxes, requiring voters to mail in completed absentee ballots or deliver them to an election official
• Require a person requesting an absentee ballot to provide a driver’s license number or Social Security number to get one
• Create a process for a voter to correct or verify a signature on an absentee ballot that might otherwise be tossed for a nonmatching signature
• Ban vote harvesting, defined as a third-party group helping a voter fill out an absentee ballot to benefit a specific candidate
Only SB 1 contains the following:
• Authorizes state election officials to compare Department of Public Safety driving records with voter rolls to find potential non-citizen voters
• Requires any person who transports three or more voters other than family members to the polls to fill out a form
From the linked article:
More than 200 people showed up Saturday at the Texas Capitol to make their voices heard on the latest Republican-drafted elections bills, the majority party’s top priority for a special session of the Legislature after Democrats blocked their previous attempt in May.
…
The majority of the testifiers were against the bill. Many were wearing shirts with the names of civil rights groups and unions written across the fronts and holding signs that urged the Legislature to “Say no to Jim Crow 2.0.”
Birdie Kelley, a precinct chair and former election judge, said many of the voters she encountered at her polling place were older Black people whose own parents had told them stories of having to count jelly beans or recite portions of the U.S. Constitution in order to vote.
They were proud to vote, she said, but they often didn’t know they could vote by mail or how to request an application to do so. She and others played an essential role in giving them an application — something that could open them up to consequences under Republican proposals to make it a criminal offense for an election official to distribute an unsolicited mail ballot application.
“So what happens now?” she said. “Now we have all these restrictions on the ballot. … I’m just requesting that we not make it harder — we make it easier for them.”
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My bold.
if the Republicans have their way, that’s right back where we’re headed.
There’s a lot of alarming shit in that bill but it seems like the end game is to create legislative triggers which then allow right-leaning elections officials to decide which voters can vote and which votes count. As I mentioned in another thread, it’s transparent corruption. But it’s still corruption. In some ways it’s worse than covert corruption. With covert corruption, it’s entirely possible that, once exposed, public outrage leads to a public sanction against the offenders. With transparent corruption, it eventually becomes accepted as an inevitable and normal part of the process. Over time, people accept illiberalism.
And right on cue, our Republican AG (the same one who sued to have swing state EC votes thrown out because reasons) has arrested a Houston man who allegedly voted in the Democratic primary last year while out on parole. He could face up to 20 years in prison, even though every indication is that he wasn’t aware that he was barred from voting (and elections officials allowed him to register to vote even though he was on parole).
We finally have it, people! Our evidence of voter fraud! More than sufficient justification for all of the above.
The sentence is obviously grossly disproportionate to the offense of what amounts to nothing more than ignorance of the law. The intent is clearly to create a sense of trepidation among voters who might be less familiar with voting laws. People are going to start wondering if driving a fourth person to the polling station or incorrectly filling out a form will land them in prison for a decade or longer. It’s beyond time to end the filibuster to deal with this shit once and for all. Every day ‘moderate’ (gutless) democrats allow this to happen while they have the power to stop it is an affront to the entire democratic history of this country.
And since we’re on the subject of “grossly disproportionate” things happening in Texas:
Texas lawmakers are moving swiftly to reinstate funding for the Texas Legislature, vetoed last month by Gov. Greg Abbott, that affects the salaries of more than 2,100 employees across several state agencies
The House Appropriations Committee voted 21-0 on the second day of the session to move forward a bill that would reinstate the funding after Abbott vetoed it to punish House Democrats who broke quorum in the final days of the regular session to kill two of his priority bills.
…
But guess what??
…
Abbott’s veto of Article X of the state budget wiped out funding for the legislative branch. He said lawmakers who “walk off the job” should not receive compensation, but his action does not affect lawmakers, whose pay is constitutionally guaranteed.
The veto applies to the thousands of staffers who work directly for lawmakers and several state agencies. …
If funding for the legislative branch is not restored by September, when the new fiscal year starts, those employees would lose their jobs and benefits, such as health care.
…
Honestly, I think it’s time for Democrats in TX, GA and other states where Republicans are rolling back voting rights to accept a bitter message – no one is coming to your rescue. Manchin and Sinema are not going to eliminate the filibuster. Even if they did, the Supreme Court has tipped their hand that they will rule for these states should their voter suppression methods run afoul of new federal statutes. The only tools you have are those you have at hand. It’ll be like trying to run the 100 meter dash with a player piano strapped to their backs, but they have no choice but to do it.
The best thing to focus on now is using these measures to generate outrage among Democrats and Independents, and organizing for the elections. Their only option is going to be to run successfully under the new rules, then use the levers of power to repeal them. It stinks, but it’s the reality.
Here’s some more background on what I posted above:
Claudia Torres-Yañez walked into the Texas Capitol at 7:30 a.m. Saturday to testify against Republican efforts to enact new voting restrictions in the state.
Fifteen hours later, she was still waiting to be heard by lawmakers.
Republicans’ second attempt to further tighten the state’s voting rules drew an enormous crowd to the Capitol on a Saturday morning as hundreds of Texans — most of them in opposition to the legislation — showed up to speak before state lawmakers in overlapping Senate and House hearings on similar bills.
By Saturday evening, 295 had signed up to testify at the House’s hearing. Many of them had registered their place in line as early as 8 a.m. But public testimony in the House committee would not begin until 1:41 a.m. on Sunday — 17-and-a-half hours after the meeting began.
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Well, dang! What’s it going to take to make these people give up and go home??
I don’t know, but whatever it is, I hope it’s spectacular enough to make the evening news—every night for weeks.
THAT is the only thing that could possibly move Congressional Democrats to pressure their ‘filibuster is sacred’ willfully-ignorant peers to wake up and smell the death-of-democracy.
Although I can see the virtues of flurb’s argument:
…I still hold out hope that a massive-enough movement, in enough states, could force a move on both the filibuster and the right-sizing of SCOTUS. (Thirteen circuit courts should mean thirteen Justices; the number of Justices has changed several times in US history without any radical or extreme results.)
As asahi pointed out above:
The ‘can’t give water to people in line’ or ‘can’t drive four people to the polls’ provisions are the ones catching public attention. But of course it’s the 'legislatures or other GOP bodies get to decide which votes count’ provisions that signal the really radical shift—something brand new in US history, though sadly familiar throughout the world and time.
Why would anyone bother to vote at all if they know their GOP legislature is simply going to declare whichever winners it prefers?
When people understand this clearly, it will send many to the streets.
This is certainly no surprise. But geez, why hear from the public at all??
… The Senate State Affairs Committee took about 45 minutes on Sunday afternoon to approve the bill, known as S.B.1, on a 6-to-3 party-line vote after slightly modifying the bill with nine Republican amendments. “We feel good about the bill,” said Bryan Hughes, the Republican committee chairman.
Earlier, the committee was in session for nearly 15 hours, until about 1:30 a.m. Sunday, hearing testimony from more than 200 witnesses, many of them opposed to the bill.
The hearings before the House committee went even longer, concluding at about 7:30 a.m. Sunday with a vote to approve the bill after nearly 24 hours of debate and public comment. All nine Republicans on the committee supported the bill, while the five Democrats voted against it.
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No, they will go back to watch “dancing with the stars” and your country will descend into a religious autocracy, ruled by a succession of mentally challenged amoral fools.
Yeah, honestly, Americans are asleep at the wheel. If our 401Ks and IRAs are good, it doesn’t matter what happens. Republicans could literally declare democracy’s dead and it wouldn’t matter.
A lot of folks would be quite content with a North Korea style dictatorship.
The Dear Leader would tell them they are the best in the world, even when they are getting rations cut for the 4th time, and are down to eating cockroaches and a rat on a stick. But those black folks down the road don’t have a rat OR a stick, so it’s all good.
This certainly isn’t going to happen before the 2022 elections, which are less than 16 months away, at which point Republicans may well have used these new laws to take the House and Senate and cement their control of these states.
Look, I’m not advocating defeatism – quite the opposite. Accepting that no one is coming to save you can be terrifying, but it can also be invigorating. It clarifies the stakes. Bitching about Joe Manchin has become a pathology among Democrats. They should take all that mental energy they’re dedicating to trying to decipher the Sphinx of West Virginia and dedicate it to coming up with new innovative ways to organize. Stacey Abrams showed what you can accomplish when you have a relentless focus on registering and getting out Democratic-leaning voters. Republicans are throwing up obstacles with these laws, but they’re obstacles that can be overcome. And if Democrats manage to get elected despite these new laws – that’s pretty much the ballgame.
But it won’t matter how many people get out and vote for Democrats if the state they are voting in permits its GOP-dominated state legislature to declare the winners it prefers.
It won’t matter a whit.
I’m NOT saying ‘don’t register people to vote, don’t encourage people to vote.’
I’m just saying we need federal voting legislation to combat state attempts to render elections irrelevant. (Which means convincing the Filibuster Before Country Congress-people that they need to get their heads out of the sand.)
And we almost certainly need a right-sized Supreme Court in order to combat the current Court’s likely support of state anti-democracy measures.
