Discussion for article #228706
Some excellent suggestions. Too bad it would take a Constitutional amendment to impose term limits. But the proposed changes in the confirmation process would require only that a few Senators agree, ask the right questions, and refuse to be put off.
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“The belief that the justices are objective.”
i don’t know anybody who actually believes that. how can he really think the public believes this?
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I really think it’s time to stop with the charade and start accurately describing the judges as what they are, i.e., Democrats and Republicans or, in very rare cases, Independents.
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If the President of the United States of America, as of today the most powerful man on Earth, cannot stay in office more than 8 years for obvious reasons, then I fail to understand why a SCOTUS justice can’t be replaced at the same rate as Presidents. I mean, in a Nation of well over 300 millions people we can certainly find replacement for 9 souls more often than now.
And since it will take an amendment to the Constitution to change the current state of affairs, let’s also give The People the power to elect these justices at the time we elect candidates to congress and/or a new President.
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I don’t know. Probably because people are told it, honestly. Until you actually look at what they do people tend to think it. It’s what judges DO. Supposedly.
Of course anyone who pays even the slightest bit of attention knows otherwise.
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Even though you’re an idiot, I was actually with you until you hit the direct voting for SCOTUS.
“And now, here she is, Chief Justice Jennifer Lopez!!!”
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The original idea behind the lifetime appointment was to insulate the justices from political pressure. In many parts of the country, judges have to stand for election, which IMHO is a pretty dubious practice; judges have to consider whether a given decision will get them turfed out, rather than thinking about what the law says.
Having said that, I’d agree that the lifetime appointment to SCOTUS is not appropriate. It encourages presidents to nominate very young justices, both so that they’ll stay in place a long time, and because less experienced nominees will have less of a record to be used against them during confirmation. It also means that justices long past their expiration date can stay on the court polluting decision making.
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…and all Justices should be agnostic or atheist.
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Well, Congress PRETENDS to think that justices are objective. Remember Thomas stating with a straight face that he had never in his life thought about abortion? How about Roberts, with his famous shit-eating grin claiming to want to be an “umpire?” They all say that they can’t discuss their beliefs because it would stop their objectivity. And they get away with it. Time and time again.
So, what I think is that the public is pretending to believe it too. Why? Because to acknowledge what this man is stating as truth (which, of course it IS) would be to acknowledge that the Supreme Court is broken.
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Thanks for posting one of the stupidest ideas ever!
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Iowa is a good case to prove your point regarding the election of judges. Remember Iowa was one of the first states where gay marriage was legal because the state supreme court ruled a law banning it was illegal. The money from extreme conservatives poured into the reelection of the judges who were voted out. Good judges doing their jobs without regard for their reelection nevertheless lost their judgeships because of Citizens United.
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In the first few chapters I criticize the Supreme Court on race, and at times of crisis, and the Lochner Era [an early 20th century period when it struck down minimum wage and federal child labor laws]. I think liberals and conservatives would agree that those decisions were wrong.
Prof. Chemerinsky has been one of my heroes since law school, when his treatise was the crutch that carried me over the line to an A in Federal Jurisdiction at a school with a hard C curve, but I think he’s either being gracious to conservatives or else is a bit behind the curve. Opposing minimum wage and child labor laws is now considered mainstream conservative thought, a thing a Republican politician may say without the slightest fear of it being treated as a career ending gaffe by our Excellent Oh So Liberal Mainstream Media.
Republican judicial “scholars” openly espouse returning us to the Lochner era, and anyone who thinks they think Plessey was a moral and Constitutional error hasn’t read the changes the Republican General Assembly made to North Carolina’s voting laws in 2011.
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Would Prof. Chemerinsky’s proposals have prevented the 3 worst decisions he cites (and they were truly terrible)? Would more justices appointed by FDR have refused him the ability to intern Japanese-Americans in wartime? Doubtful. Would more justices appointed by slavery-tolerating Presidents like Pierce and Buchanan have ruled against slavery? Doubtful.
The truth is that the Court largely reflects public opinion, despite protestations to the contrary. Take same sex marriage. Does anyone think that had the cases come to the Court 10 years ago, they would have allowed same sex marriage? I doubt that. So what changed? Is the court more liberal? No; if anything they are less so. What changed is public opinion, which now generally accepts same sex marriage. That is why the court stayed out of the matter. The Warren Court could only act against segregation because a majority in the country (though not in the South) decided it gave the US a black eye in the world at the time of the Cold War.
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The Dred Scott decision was morally wrong but legally correct. The Constitution at that time did not protect slaves, it protected masters. If the court had voted to treat Scott decently, it would have been legislating from the bench. So I don’t agree it was a bad decision. I’d call it a nasty decision.
Election of judges was probably never a great idea, but under the current law allowing the boards of corporations to act as a single “person” and throw corporate money at any election they wish to influence, it becomes merely a path to control of all three branches of government by a relative handful of oligarchs. I doubt that is what the Constitution’s original authors had in mind.
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I learned in elementary school that the Congress makes the laws, the president executes the laws, and the judiciary interprets the laws. Here is what I’d like to ask the so-called originalists: If the Constitution means only and precisely what it meant in the eighteenth century, why do we need a Supreme Court?
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I’m pretty sure it’s what Beej has in mind.
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And, similarly, how can there be two interpretations of the same law?
“…I think what I was doing implicitly in my teaching was making excuses in the Court…”
He shouldn’t be too hard on himself, because we’re all doing that with regard to conservatism in general. We make excuses for its most egregious consequences, rationalizing them as unfortunate timings, or outlying aberrations.
More women are dying because of abortion restrictions? Gosh, poor conservatives didn’t expect that in their wonderful effort to save fetuses. Children getting shot in school and on the street? Golly, those pro-gun people can’t ever catch a break as they spread around the Second Amendment freedoms. Pissed off Muslims? Jeepers, they’re touchy about Christian world domination when all we want is their oil for free. Supreme Court checking in with the Koch brothers? Did not see that coming from their coincidental attendance at Koch brothers’ barbecues.
These aren’t bugs of conservative policy. They’re features.
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