It won’t happen but wonderful to see it
Would be lovely to see.
They only introduce these bills when they don’t have a majority
It’s basically a threat to the billionaires.
It’s bread and circuses. Now they can tell their supporters that they tried but “those darn Republicans kept it from happening! Vote harder next time and we’ll make it happen!”
When the Democrats next have a majority across the board, they’ll have some convenient reason they can’t reintroduce the bill. They’ve followed this pattern for decades. Democrats are the ‘good cop’, Republicans are the ‘bad cop’, but they’re all ‘cops’. They’re ultimately on the same team and serve the same interests - those of the rich.
Honestly I’d rather see good legislation introduced and voted down than never introduced at all. It gives hope and helps show what politicians might actually want compared to what they think they can actually pass.
This gives you hope?
I mean it’s better than the alternative
Agree.
Pictured: Worst Supreme Court ever.
Worst supreme Court ever so far.
I mean, possibly not quite if we go back far enough in history, Dred Scott was a thing after all.
The Lochner Era might have been worse than the pre-civil war era.
To know that the Lochner Era was like, just imagine this court in 10-years.
The Supreme Court during the Lochner era has been described as “play[ing] a judicially activist but politically conservative role”.[5] The Court sometimes invalidated state and federal legislation that inhibited business or otherwise limited the free market, including minimum wage laws, federal (but not state) child labor laws, regulations of banking, insurance and transportation industries.[5] The Lochner era ended when the Court’s tendency to invalidate labor and market regulations came into direct conflict with Congress’s regulatory efforts in the New Deal.
The Lochner court struck down laws that would have lessened the impact of the 1929 stock market crash, and also struck down efforts to shorten the depression.
FDR flat out said that if they didn’t knock it off, he would appoint as many justices as needed to undo the damage.
This current bill is maybe not the way to do it. Just add a few more seats (13 Total, to match the number of appeals circuits), and then maybe name the Federalist Society a hate group and ineligible for federal service in any capacity.
name the Federalist Society a hate group
to be fair, if we pretend they hate white people it would be signed faster than the ink could dry
I know Thomas predates the Federalist Society, but isn’t hating white people his justification for taking all that money and vacations from them?
I dunno. A previous one actually caused the civil war by declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. Then there’s separate but equal. Then there’s the fact that the Court decided that the constitution gave it the power to rule in the constitutionality of laws even though it doesn’t say that. Then there’s saying that the second amendment applies to people rather than militias.
Wouldn’t you know it, the Federalist Society implicitly supports all of those supreme courts. Their president Leonard Leo is behind half of the current supreme court appointments
And that’s to say nothing of Dred Scott or Korematsu.
Korematsu wa nan desu ka?
Korematsu is the name of the SCOTUS case that allowed for the internment of Japanese Americans during WW2.
Since then it’s widely been viewed as a terrible and deeply shameful decision and is taught in law schools as a textbook example of how SCOTUS power can go badly wrong, especially during times of war.
Arigato
I was with you until the last sentence. Nobody should complain about having rights. Support all rights for all Americans.
Rights don’t just grow on trees you know, they are hard as fuck to get.
Then there’s saying that the second amendment applies to people rather than militias.
In order to protect a Collective Right the 2A had to protect an Individual Right. It literally couldn’t function any other way. In the context of the 1A it would be as if there was a Right To Assembly (Collective Right) but no right to Free Speech (Individual Right). That interpretation isn’t new either, it’s present in nearly every SCOTUS case that involved the 2nd Amendment.
I agree that SCOTUS has problems but their take on the 2A is well supported by previous decisions and historical documents.
That’s a pretty tall claim. Maybe the worst SCOTUS in your lifetime, but if you know anything of US history, you’d know that calling it the worst SCOTUS of all time is a pretty tall order.
Hey, let’s give this Court a chance. They could still ignite a civil war if they tried harder!
So… You think court opining on Dread-Scott was better?
People seem to think they’re supposed to somehow compensate for legislators doing exactly what they were elected to accomplish - to say “fuck you” to the other party, as evidenced by people saying they could never vote for anyone from that party no matter how corrupt the politicians from their own party (totally a New York and California thing at least)
How about term limits in congress too?
I’m all for that too, but at least they can be voted out of office. Supreme Court Justices are appointed (which I’m ok with because I don’t want them campaigning) for life. Once they’re there, they never have to leave.
Do the justices get protection like the president? Seems like they should have better protection since they are lifers while the president is only max 8 years.
Like all federal court officials, they are protected by US Marshals
I only just learned about this when I started a new gubment job. Wild stuff.
Now, as to what really needs to happen here, Thomas, at the very least, should face corruption and bribery charges. Maybe conspiracy to commit, too.
they are protected by US Marshals
I’m assuming after this?
Federal judges sometimes don’t want protection around them and it’s not like the Secret Service and the President. While the Secret Service can tell the President what must happen, the Marshals can’t mandate protection details. But, when things like that happen, they certainly do.
while the president is only max 8 years.
10, technically, but it doesn’t change your point. Just felt like doing an ackshully.
#sorrynotsorry
10? i thought as long as they didnt get the majority of the term they could keep going (so thereoretically infinite)
Per the 22nd Amendment, someone who has held the office for more than two years of someone else’s elected term is limited to a single elected term of their own. So if you’ve done two or fewer, you are still eligible to be elected twice. Those two initial years plus your two elected terms would be ten years.
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.
okay so just serve 1.99 of the terms of multiple other people and you have infinite terms
Also there’s the whole non-consecutive term thing.
Technically, 9 and 364/365 years, give or take a day for leap year(s).
The idea was to ensure that the court never became political. This obviously didn’t work out, but the framers had good intentions.
If they wanted that it shouldn’t have been appointed by a political party
There were no political parties and they literally believed that none would ever form. They created the US government based on the idea that parties would never exist. Naive, obviously.
We elect House members every 2 years and Senate every 6, whereas Supreme Court justices are lifetime appointments
This is comparing apples and plastic bottles
I feel like regulations on plastic bottles are just as useful as regulations on apples, even if the regulations are a bit different.
Just because two things are different doesn’t mean they can’t have something in common.
Fix election rules, campaign finances and gerrymandering and congress will get sorted out.
Couldn’t the same be said for the supreme court?
No. Supreme Court Justices are not elected.
But the article says some of those reasons are why this law is needed.
It’s almost too easy.
Weirdly enough, that was actually one of the things Trump campaigned on. Just about the only thing I’ve ever agreed with him on, and I don’t like the feeling lol.
He campaigned on a lot of things he never had any intention of following up on. I wouldn’t take that as a sign that he actually agreed with the sentiment.
And all their salaries should be decided by the people.
Ironically, one of the few explicit stipulations in the constitution about the supreme court says their salary cannot be reduced during their time in office.
Sounds great in principle but the reality is that the problem is lobbying and money in politics, not politicians who stay in office too long. Term limits tend to give lobbyists more power because they can “guide” the new politicians more easily if a given percentage of them are always new. The problem is the money.
You know we fucked up when in order to enact oversight on a branch of government we need to ask for their consent first.
This is just an aside, but I love how oversight means making sure mistakes/abuses don’t happen too much but also means mistake 😄
Also: to oversee (supervise); to overlook (neglect); to look over (examine).
Sometimes I think we just need to start over with a new language from scratch. This one is so fucked up there’s no saving it. We can take the lessons we’ve learned making this mess into making something more elegant.
That kind of reminds me of this
But how will we communicate this?
Dance?
English does have a very ‘Mad Max’ (thrown together) vibe to it.
That’s what happens when you get your French in their German and they get their German in your French. Two good languages that go bad together.
Autoantonyms or contronyms! I love these!
“The Democrats have gone too far! If we introduced term limits for the Supreme Court then Clarence Thomas might have to pay for his own vacations one day!” - Fox News
This would be better if they also limited their own terms in the bill
I’m pretty sure that’s a state-by-state thing. I’m also pretty sure that some states already have some term limits.
You would be right on both counts.
That being said, term limits for members of Congress to solve anything is one of those things that sound good on the surface but could actually make everything even worse.
It’s supposed to decrease corruption by incumbents being less entrenched, but it could be the cause of much MORE corruption by making the revolving door between corrupt business interests and corrupt politics spin faster…
Could just add in sensible term limits of like 10-20 years. Also not allow them to own stock
Except the first one wouldn’t work, for the reason described above.
Banning them from holding stock would probably help a lot, though. Too bad that it won’t happen as long as oil boy Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi’s even more corrupt protégé are the Dem leaders of the two Chambers and their Republican counterparts continue to be even worse 😮💨
Or at least not individual stocks.
Having a bog standard market tracker would be fine.
It would also force out politicians that might actually be effective.
Yeah, exactly!
IMO, ranked choice voting, publicly (and only publicly) funded elections and outlawing partisan and otherwise discriminating gerrymandering would be much better solutions.
Will probably never happen though, since the people in charge of reforming the system are themselves amongst the main beneficiaries of the corruption inherent in the system 🤦
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Do you mean like with actual rules and PENALTIES!!! I’m betting that it will be as unconstitutional as hell, by the predictable majority.
If the founding fathers were for the right to the pursuit of happiness away from the control of the moneyed noble elite, they would have put it in the constitution or at least have a revolution over it!!!1!!.
But with short terms, the court might be politicized!!1 /s
Let’s start with this premise: the court is politicized because the two party system demands it over a long enough period of time.
And now we can work our way forward.
Do it when there’s a chance of it passing, otherwise it’s clear you’re just looking for votes in the next election for reasons you’ll never follow through with.
Not with this attitude. Did you consider writing your representative that you support this motion?
This puts the vote on record so that people have some idea who they’re electing. Because it likely won’t pass, you won’t learn who really supports the idea, but you’ll definitely find out who opposes it. That’s very valuable information, and can only truly be learned by a vote.
If you do this outside a Constitutional Amendment, what will happen is that it will just get challenged up to the Supreme Court, who will then strike it down.
Not really. The constitution only says that the SCOTUS exists and is the highest court. Everything else is up to Congress. There didn’t always used to be 9 justices for instance. Congress has even passed laws to strip the court of the right to hear any case they want. Some types of cases have to go through special courts of original jurisdiction, like bankruptcy.
Because Presidential term limits were defined by the 22nd Amendment, I guarantee the court will not accept limitations without a new amendment. Especially not this court.
The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.
During good behavior. This is clearly not limited by time or age. The only way to remove them without their retirement or death is via impeachment for a violation of “good behavior.” This stuff can be changed but the way to do so is via amendment.
Bad behavior would still require an impeachment.
Even if that were true, they should STILL try it. You do it to put the pressure on, to slowly move forward, put the idea in the news, on people’s minds, etc. It may seem futile but we have to start somewhere.
That’s how you waste political capital on ineffective, performative measures which do nothing but guarantee supreme court challenge.
If you want to waste taxpayer money, this is the way to do it.
As if “political capital” is being properly spent elsewhere. Must be nice in happy fantasy land.
See that’s what people said during the Trump impeachments. Everyone knew it wouldn’t go anywhere and it changed nothing.
I mean, he’s not president and he’s got more indictments than you can shake a stick at.
Yeah, and nobody can stop him from being the next Republican candidate for President.
His fanbase is the living personification of this:
https://effectiviology.com/backfire-effect-facts-dont-change-minds/
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Can this be done with an act of congress or does it take a constitutional amendment?
There’s nothing that says it can’t be done. But I’m sure SCOTUS will have something to say should a case make it to them.
Constitutional amendment would be the best way. Not sure if it would be easier via Congress or State Legislatures given the implosion on Capitol Hill.
I can completely imagine the SCOTUS, especially the current SCOTUS, taking any law passed by the legislature and saying “Yeah that’s unconstitutional” with the power to destroy all laws they unilaterally granted themselves.
So much for “checks and balances” on the actual Supreme Court.
Pretty sure that the only check on SCOTUS has always been “just trust them, bro”.
Frankly it reflects very poorly on the public debate that there hasn’t been any major debates about actually doing something about that for almost 250 years, grumbling about specific decisions not really counting…
No, the Constitution says, “The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.” in Article 3 and in Article 1 “The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”
It could be said that Congress is mandated to pass a law defining Good Behavior, so that the judicial branch can execute its powers as defined in the constitution.
There has been debate on this actually. I can’t find it because all search results are returning articles about current trust, but there was a period in history of very low trust in the court. This almost lead to some major changes, but they managed to rehabilitate their image by not being total villains. I want to say this was surrounding civil rights stuff, but I can’t exactly recall.
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That’s a great question. I think the short answer is that while it may technically be possible through legislation there will most certainly be immediate and then ongoing constitutional challenges.
The best way to implement this would absolutely be through a constitutional ammendment so as to set an incredibly high bar in order to undo these changes. However, accomplishing that seems unlikely given the gridlock that defines congress in the modern era.
Yeah, the most realistic (but still extremely unrealistic) way of achieving it would be a constitutional convention.
Besides it beingunrealisticto even make it happen, that would be a horrible idea though, since there being little to no framework about exactly how it would work, which means that unscrupulous politicians (*cough& Republicans cough) could potentially add or remove several other amendments.
All that to say that this is probably the most effective method currently available. As a bonus, the SCOTUS overruling it would probably cause such an uproar that Congress would attempt to introduce a new way that CAN’T be blocked but doesn’t require changing the constitution.
I got mixed feelings on this one. The whole idea of lifetime appointments was to make justices incorruptible, not beholden to anyone, and I like that, and it’s mostly worked. Once they’re in, their main concern is their legacy, it’s a big deal for these judges. (And we know, someone’s just fucking itching to tell us how corrupt Thomas is. We know.)
The better solution is probably adding more justices. That dilutes the power of the President to appoint a majority and dilutes the power of individual justices. Tie it to something other than the whim of Congress. One for each circuit court?
Oh, and how about some ethics rules? Didn’t Amy Coney Barrett just come out in favor?
Oh, and how about some ethics rules? Didn’t Amy Coney Barrett just come out in favor?
According to another poster in a different thread a few days ago, the ethics guidelines are basically already in place and just aren’t enforced. That person suggested that we need more enforcement or penalties rather than more ethics rules.
I like your idea of adding more justices because of what you said about diluting the president’s power to appoint a majority. It’s an interesting point, although we shouldn’t be in the situation we are in now (“Wait, wait, you can’t rush the process…oh, now that we have the majority we need to finish this quickly!”)
The whole idea of lifetime appointments was to make justices incorruptible, not beholden to anyone, and I like that, and it’s mostly worked.
Just keep paying them for life while barring future employment. Plus, whatever the intention, this clearly hasn’t made them incorruptible, so sticking to it for a purpose it doesn’t succeed at is pointless.
Once they’re in, their main concern is their legacy
Apparently the legacy some of them are gunning for is ‘we owned the libs and put women back in their place’ tho
Cool, we desperately need this. Shame it’ll die in the senate.
Shame it’ll die in the senate.
It’s why they’re introducing it now instead of when Democrats held control of the house.
There’s always comments like this. But I gotta wonder. How many bills do you think can and are voted on every congressional session? Do you think it’s possible to introduce and vote on every single bill they’ll ever support when a particular party has the power? Or do you really think they pick and choose and make a show of waiting until it’s impossible to pass? Do you really think there wasn’t another bill or lots of bills that they wanted to pass before that took precedent? And what about the time needed to draft and discuss the bills pior introducing them? That certainly needs its own time.
Let’s put it this way: they won’t reintroduce it when they have the ability to pass it.
If it didn’t die in the Senate it would die in the courts as the unconstitutional tripe that it is. Complete waste of time.
Technically speaking, if it were proposed and passed as an amendment, it wouldn’t be unconstitutional. But then it’d have to pass by a larger margin and almost certainly wouldnt.
Political theater from the Dems, though I’ll admit it would be fun when scotus sues to stop the law then is the plaintiff on a case before itself where it gets to rule as to whether the exceptions clause is in that part of the constitution that is absolutely the law of the land or in that part of the constitution that is inconvenient and to be ignored
The conversation has to start. US health care isn’t there, but it has advanced in my lifetime because the conversation started with bills like this being introduced against odds. Acknowledge that.
In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.
Congress has the power to do whatever to the Supreme Court. It’s explicit, unlike the power to declare something unconstitutional. Congress is the check on SCOTUS.
Another thing to gridlock congress, that would be sooooo effective.
