My wag, Alpha Twit, would be that congress would simply decide that the next two judges to retire/die wouldn’t be replaced. Thats actually the easiest AND simplest part of that hypothetical.
On review, what I said isn’t true at all. Since it’s too late for an edit, I retract my former statement.
Why do you think that wouldn’t be possible?
That’s exactly how Congress reduced the Court during Andrew Johnson’s presidency, to keep him from appointing Justices.
There’s a good argument to make that it should be an even number so there can’t be a tie. Winning by one vote makes for pretty bad precedents, and increasingly politicizes the court.
If you had to win by two votes, there would be fewer very close split decisions.
A tie isn’t that bad. It just means that the lower court decision stands and no national precedent is made. That’s arguably better than a 5-4 decision that gets reversed a decade later.
Wait, I thought a tie means a precedent is made - for instance, when Abigail Fisher brought her case to SCOTUS, trying to get affirmative action overturned, the Court ruled 4-4 and it meant that affirmative action was upheld and that such a case can’t be brought to SCOTUS again - or does it mean “nothing happens” and a similar case ***can ***be relitigated?
We might need a legal scholar to chime in, but my understanding is that a tie means that whatever decision the lower court made stands, but that it doesn’t establish anything in general.
The court generally issues a very brief decision, and there’s obviously no strong precedent because they couldn’t even agree on what the precedent should be. Presumably as soon as any justice has changed, or even if a case with very slightly different details arises, the court might revisit the issue.
The Court is its own arbiter of what cases can be brought to it (within Constitutional limits). Presumably if the composition of the court hadn’t changed and the case wasn’t sufficiently different, they wouldn’t bother to hear another case that they’d deadlock on. But that’s their call to make.
That’s correct. A tie in the US Supreme Court just means that the appeal is dismissed and the lower court judgment stands, by without setting any precedent.
It takes a majority vote to allow an appeal, and a majority to establish a precedent.
It’s a bit different in the Commonwealth courts.
In addition to what others have said, it should be mentioned that for most of American history, the Supreme Court wasn’t all that important.
This.
And I couldn’t be happier that Court-packing is quickly turning into a litmus-test issue in the Democratic primary.
In the three or four threads on this topic, I still have yet never seen an answer to the question of how the D’s intend to pack the Court without expecting similar Republican escalation down the road.
Seems to me an even bigger obstacle is that the Republicans could filibuster. Is there any reason they couldn’t.
And if the answer is that Democrats will end the filibuster, consider that if Democrats do win the Senate, it will surely be with only a one- or two-vote majority. To pass anything, they’ll need moderates like Angus King, Doug Jones, and Joe Manchin on board. I don’t see those three going along with such a plan.
It’s harder to get a consensus in a big group. A Supreme Court with 21 members would be so divided. It wouldn’t just be conservative/liberal.
Imagine the posters in GD and all the views expressed. Project that onto SCOTUS.
9 is a good number. It allows some shift in positions. Roberts for example has voted with the other side several times. Kavanaugh has already done it several times.
Consensus isn’t necessarily necessary or beneficial; it’s good to have diverse views. And the lack of consensus becomes irrelevant anyway eventually - at the end of the day, a vote is a vote: One way or another, there will be a vote in favor of a particular outcome when the justices cast their ballots.
While I agree that court-packing would not be a good idea, the possibility of “turn-about is fair play” down the road didn’t stop Republicans from blocking Garland’s nomination or any number of other ploys that could come back to bite them in the ass when they are no longer in control.
There is a practical limit to court packing. Each Justice is an expensive salary to pay for the rest of their lives, once there are hundreds of justices it becomes difficult for them to even all ask their questions during a hearing, and so on.
So if one party decided to go hard and make the Supreme Court 500 people, it would be tough for the other party to really increase the limit enough to overcome the votes of the 500 people already there.
What? Please read a good book about the Court. Hell, even read a bad book about the Court. It just ain’t true.
In many ways, the Court is less important today than at most earlier times. In fact, the number of cases it hears has been declining for decades, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of cases filed.
The appeals courts have large numbers of judges. The 9th district has 29. They handle the numbers by having most cases handled by three-person panels. Only for a few major cases does the entire circuit hear them.
Doing it this way greatly increases the number of cases that get heard. Most cases stop at the panel level. This vastly helps the process.
Right now the Supreme Court does not grant certiorari to the great majority of cases. It couldn’t possible handle the load, even if it went back to case levels of the 1960s. A much larger court that split into panels to handle the lesser stuff could greatly increase caseload.
Political implications aside, a larger court is an answer to an urgent need.
Is it urgent enough that you’d like to see the current Congress enlarge the SCOTUS and the current President pick a bunch of additional judges, and have them approved by the current Senate?
Maybe? Right now, with the Federal appeals system, there is a geographic difference in what “justice” means. Obviously if your case gets heard by the 9th circuit, “justice” means a more liberal outcome.
But if you had 301 justices on the Supreme court, split into 9 justice panels, it would be really rare for a case to be held by the whole court. Most of the time, it would essentially be like appealing to another level of Federal appeals court. Still tons of opportunity for injustice to happen, and appeals courts usually just uphold the lower court.
What part of “political implications aside” didn’t you understand?
Can we have a cite on this?
*
Fewer than 9 percent of total appeals resulted in reversals of lower court decisions in 2015. Appeals of decisions in U.S. civil cases and prisoner petition appeals had the lowest rates of reversals (See Table 2 and Chart 3).
*
Also remember that parties who don’t feel they have a strong case are not going to appeal. Most civil and criminal cases end in a settlement between the parties, not a court decision, and these settlements are generally not appeal-able as they were agreed to by both sides. (in rare cases, new evidence is discovered and then the original settlement gets appealed by the side of the case that the new evidence supports)