Joe Biden worries that the “extreme” US supreme court, dominated by rightwing justices, cannot be relied upon to uphold the rule of law.
“I worry,” the president told ProPublica in interview published on Sunday. “Because I know that if the other team, the Maga Republicans, win, they don’t want to uphold the rule of law.”
“Maga” is shorthand for “Make America great again”, Donald Trump’s campaign slogan. Trump faces 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats but nonetheless dominates Republican polling for the nomination to face Biden in a presidential rematch next year.
In four years in the White House, Trump nominated and saw installed three conservative justices, tilting the court 6-3 to the right. That court has delivered significant victories for conservatives, including the removal of the right to abortion and major rulings on gun control, affirmative action and other issues.
The new court term, which starts on Tuesday, could see further such rulings on matters including government environmental and financial regulation.
Yeah, the drafters of our constitution really fucked up in that regard.
I’d attempt to solve the problem by creating an independent judicial review board entirely separate from the US govt. similar to other “professional” professions. Let these judges go up for review every 5 years and if they are found to be in breach of conduct, remove them from the bench.
Also, rework how they get to the bench in the first place. Of course the SC is going to be politically motivated. They only get their seats because one of the two big parties literally puts them there. Impartiality is really hard to claim when you owe your entire existence as a SC judge to a giant money machine.
Lifetime appointments mean they don’t owe anyone shit. They have nothing to gain by being loyal to the party that appointed them. There are better ways to accomplish the same thing, but it’s at least one facet of how the court works that seems to do what it’s supposed to.
Which is why Congress has the power to remove them if they fail to meet “good behavior”. But Congress is also abdicating their responsibility to democracy.
For some, but what we’ve seen is them moving to appointing committed ideologues. If you want someone who agrees with your theocratic beliefs you appoint a young theocratic nutjob like Justice Barrett. They also established a feeding program to ensure mildly conservative law students would be rabidly conservative by the time they’re judges and using the fact that this program feeds you into judgeship as the way to get people into it.
The whole point of a lifetime appointment is that they can abandon all political concerns once they’re in the SCOTUS - so they don’t have to be political. And I’ve seen that happen - while they obviously stay conservative or progressive, they tend to drift away from an alignment with the parties - with exceptions, obviously.
But, as with all other branches of the US government, it’s becoming clear that we’ve exited the era of being able to trust our leadership to support the Constitution and represent the people.
(For me, it wasn’t even Trump that snapped me out of that mindset. It was when they were talking about outlawing congressional insider trading. One of the Republicans said, out loud and in public, that the notion of prohibiting congressional sick trading was off the table, because it was a core part of the job. He said something like, “half of us wouldn’t be here” - as though that was a bad thing.)
You should get the same behavior with a single term appointment with no possibility of a second term. There would also have to be limits to what they can do AFTER the appointment too, so they don’t use their single term power to set themselves up when they are done. I guess it would have to be a single term appointment with an extended ban on future employment or investments.
But how long would those appointments be? Many justices have written about how long it took to adjust sitting on Scotus, even if they had plenty of experience on the court of appeals(Sotomayor I think?). So like a 10 year period might work. Scalia and RBG voted together a surprising number of times… So there is something to the experience brought to the table. Thomas’s corruption is just nuts and Alito is frustrating, but the other justices at least have substantiating arguments mostly.
I don’t necessarily think the founders fucked up. It’s important that the court be free from political influence when deciding cases so I think they had the right idea. I’m not necessarily opposed to lifetime appointments. Where I think there’s a lot of room for improvement is the nomination and confirmation process. It’s entirely political, contentious, and has produced a few lousy justices in recent years.
This idea of one party only appointing conservatives and the other only appointing liberals and both sides hating the other’s appointments is what’s fucked up. What could be interesting is a bipartisan Congressional nominating committee that produces candidates that are at least palatable to both sides. Let’s say there’s a 2/3 majority requirement for the committee to nominate someone. They could produce a list of several candidates and the president nominates one of them. Basically take this process away from partisan NGOs and give it to a bipartisan group of elected representatives.
Yeah, the drafters of our constitution really fucked up in that regard.
The thing is, the drafters of the constitution didnt mean for the supreme Court to be as powerful as it is today. There is nothing in the constitution that even grants them the power of judicial review. They just interpreted that they inherently had that power, and we’ve gone along with it for the last hundred years.
According to the drafters, separating the judicial branch from the executive was a way to inhibit veto power and to prevent the executive from reshaping laws that have been passed by Congress. There only other function was to handle cases between two states, and to oversee an impeachment trial in the Senate.
It wasn’t entirely about the rights to review, but also about their impotence to do more than just talk. The balance of powers isn’t just that Congress can impeach, but also that they can write laws that address the Court’s arguments directly and the executive can just tell them “no”. But we’ve let them just be the final arbiter of law with no response from either other body, so they’re now just unelected super-legislators.
When the court is embroiled in corruption scandals and abandoning precedent to strip rights from citizens, the other executive institutions in the country shouldn’t just be acquiescing to their demands. Instead we get “you may be unethical and corrupt, and firing off society shaking reinterpretations to settled law, but thems the breaks”.
Tiptoeing into calling their adherence to the rule of law into question is moving in the right direction, but very slowly. Maybe that’s the right way to do it, but I don’t really trust that it’s not just a misplaced belief in the system to work itself out so moderates don’t have to actually do anything that might be scary.
They probably never expected anyone in government to be so openly corrupt and incorrigible. At the time they wrote the declaration they probably viewed democracy like the roman Republic did and thought the people would categorically reject anyone willfully stealing their rights and freedoms for their own political or personal gain. Of course they couldn’t foresee a political party so openly hypocritical that they would literally lie on mass to a public brainwashed by unchecked “news” publications that only regurgitate what they want to hear. Democracy is f*cked, blame the murdochs.
It’s really a shame that so many seem to be clinging to a constitution that is close to 250 years old. You would think that some things would need to be updated over that period of time, but as I said, I’m from Europe…
Our constitution has been updated. Our current constitution is from the 90s. It’s just we update it in pain in the ass bits and pieces
Of course, I am aware that the U.S. Constitution has been updated several times and that any changes are a difficult political process (this is the case in every democratic country). From a European point of view, it is just difficult to understand why, for example, majority voting has still not been introduced and so on. In our system, it is unthinkable that votes are effectively devalued because the majority in one state disagrees. I understand, of course, that that was necessary some 250 years ago, so that electors could be sent to Washington to represent the will of the people of their particular state. But is that still in keeping with the times? To me, it seems antiquated - as does the attempt to guarantee independent constitutional judges by appointing them for life and thus - in theory - making them independent of political influence. I think that reality has shown that this is nothing but wishful thinking. Otherwise, a supreme justice like Clarence Thomas, who is obviously not only bound by his conscience, would probably no longer be in office. I just think that self-regulation has never really been effective - not in politics, law, or business.
I find it interesting that there are so many Europeans that have such strong opinions on the US, yet they don’t keep themselves informed on the same.
The US Constitution has been updated many, many times since it was written.
The whole thing? Has the whole thing been looked at and revised? Or are you counting each and every amendment as an “update”? That’s not an update to me. It’s an addition that ignored the many flaws with the way we run our country.
