Politics & Current Events
tosababy
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Court packing!
I posted on MM, but thought some of you ladies might want to discuss this interesting court packing plan too.
Re: Court packing!
As we already discussed, I initially thought this was a bad idea.
But if all those justices need clerks, then the standards are bound to come down. Maybe I could actually get a clerkship. Or at least it would open up some clerk positions at the lower courts, and I'm bound to be able to get one of those.
Court packing: full employment for lawyers!
Find me here instead!
That plan sounds utterly ridiculous and as a jobs program more than anything.
Ditto y4m, a swing is need and I don't think there in an unnecessary assault on the power of congress. Congress needs to take a step back and look at what their power actually is supposed to be.
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So you oppose the Partial Birth Abortion Act?
I think there are some merits to this particular idea. Namely, if people were only going to be serving for 18 years, the age of the pick is less important, so we would probably end up with more distinguished, accomplished picks. Part of the problem now is that Presidents feel obliged to pick very young justices. If you are in your 40s and already have a name for yourself on the bench, it's probably because you have a known partisan streak in you.
I'm not totally sold on it, because I do think our system for the most part works, but I would be open to hearing more before shutting conversation down.
And LMFAO at the judiciary being left leaning. If the federal judiciary was left-leaning, no company ever sued for violations of employment and consumer laws in state court would try to remove the lawsuit to federal court. Not only do they do this at every chance they get, they got a Republican-led Senate and Congress to pass a law giving companies special jurisdiction in federal court for violations of state law, and Bush signed off on it. That law is without a doubt unconstitutional and a gross abuse of federal power, but it was created because corporate America prefers federal court to state because federal courts are, by and large, more conservative.
I think if a change is wanted, the amendment process should be filed.
There are so many problems with this proposal. To name a few:
1. Where would the budget come from to support an extra 6, 8, 10, 12 supreme court justices and their chambers?
2. The Senate would be in a perpetual confirmation nightmare and never get any other work done.
3. There is something suspect about a president having his or her own 2-4 justices on the court to uphold any legislation he or she may get passed during his or her presidency.
4. Who's going to decide when the junior justices can't hear cases and the senior justices need to step in?
5. This will create de facto term limits, especially if only the 9 junior justices hear cases, which may violate the constitution.
6. The content based nature of his dissatisfaction with the current system is troubling to me (2nd to last paragraph). It's honest, but it's not how checks and balances are supposed to work.
7. His citations of 1800 and FDR's failed court packing plan as precedent are unpersuasive.
But, I don't think congress can even make murder illegal on the federal level. What provision of the constitution would that fall under?
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This is what really stuck out to me.
The idea of term limits vs. lifetime appointment doesn't exactly keep me up at night, but I can't say that I would have a huge problem with a term limit in the range of 20 to 30 years, either, provided that it's implemented via a constitutional amendment.
The point is that if you think left-leaning courts are allowing Congress to trample on the 10th Amendment, then you would think that the Supreme Court should've struck down that statute, right? It's something that should be left to the states, no?
It is one of my great frustrations that many things that should be achieved by constitution amendment, if they are to be done at all, are done by Congress as legislation instead.
That is when it is the duty of the courts to determine if Congress actually had the power to pass the legislation.
I think these are all excellent points, with #2 and #4 being the biggest concerns I'd have.
But, I also think that there is something disconcerting about the sharp ideological shifts, and that was the point in the article that stood out to me. More so than anything else, judicial decisions on social issues have been what have polarized the country and shaped modern politics, and I wouldn't say that's been for the best. I would like to function as someone who does not spend tremendous chunks of my day fretting about SCOTUS. So I'm intrigued that someone has put something daring out there for us to think about. Not because I want it adopted so much as I want us to think about whether there are smaller changes we can make to the system to improve things.
For example, once I read that someone had thrown out an idea of letting retired justices fill in when a sitting justice recuses themselves. This seems like a small tweak that may improve things - it might encourage justices to recuse themselves more often if they knew the court would have the full 9 which would reduce public criticisms about conflict of interest, and it might encourage justices to resign before they are dead, if they knew they could still stay useful and be involved in a couple cases a year. I don't see a proposal like that as court packing. But, I think you get a proposal like that passed by thinking big and drilling down.
Yet the very polarization you describe would likely prevent this idea, which is intriguing and far from the worst I've heard, to ever come to pass. Indeed, the big problem we as a nation have at the moment is the utter inability to "think big and drill down" because everything is too radical for someone somewhere, and thus we are left with incremental and ultimately useless tweaks that allow for declarations of "breakthroughs" and "bipartisanship" when in fact they are evidence of the opposite. Any proposed change that is worth a damn is viewed as a Trojan horse by the members of the party that didn't conjure the idea themselves.
ETA: /rant
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WTF? This does not make sense.
Believing that the federal government does not have the power to do something is not incompatible with believing that the states also do not have the power to do something.
Things can be constitutional and unconstitutional at the same time. So, I think that the Partial Birth Abortion ban is a constitutional use of federal commerce clause powers, and therefore the 10th Amendment does not apply. But, I think the ban is an unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, and that amendment's general principals of due process and equal treatment under the law. Thus, even if liberals generally agreed with your view of the Commerce Clause and/or the 10th Amendment, I'm hard pressed to figure out why you think we are hypocrites for believing that states, who are explicitly bound by the 14th Amendment's guarantee of due process and equal treatment under the law, should not also have the power to enact a law that liberals see as falling under its purview.