Discussion for article #228298
And that is exactly why we shouldnât do it. The whole point of the Supreme Court is to be a check against popular opinion.
The problem with ending Supreme Court Terms at a specific date â whether a birthday or a tenure date â is that it makes Presidential and Senate elections more focused on the Court and less on issues. With predictable ends to terms elections can become about changing the makeup of the Court. The result is an even greater politicization of the Court than we have already.
The Court has always been political, dating back to the first nominations through Rooseveltâs attempts to stack it to the current idiocy with Citizenâs United. The problem will be when three Justices have to leave in a single upcoming term and entire Presidential elections are about that and nothing else.
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As a second point that I didnât want to get lost in the above, the idea that the Court should represent the race, gender and socioeconomic backgrounds of the United States strikes me as wholly foolish.
For one, youâre not going to find a lot of judges making $50,000 or less a year, much less judges making $50K or less and qualified to be a Supreme Court justice.
But more importantly these folks are supposed to be the best of us, not the same as us. I am not qualified to be a Supreme Court justice, and not one person I know personally is. I wouldnât want people like me or my neighbors or my friends making decisions that these folks have to make.
We have these folks in place to represent us â elected and appointed officials â and that is because we arenât able to do these jobs ourselves and still have our own lives. For my money, I want the people representing me to be better than I am and better able to do the job than I could.
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Maybe we should just impeach Supreme Court justices who are so clueless as to believe the constitution says dollars vote and that freedom of religion is for corporations and not their employees.
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What bothers me most about the supreme ct is the people they associate with out of court Thomas wife should be in jail Scalia and the Koch brothers it just doesnât look right to me!!!
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Exactly. This is also the problem that we have with redistricting. It comes after each census, and when that happens to fall on an off year election, as in 2010, a minority of voters selects the people who will be choosing the districts that we will deal with for the next 10 years. Redistricting should not be a partisan process, and judges should always be isolated from the whims of the public and politicians.
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Redistricting is not partisan in every state, but depends on the stateâs law. Maybe we should have a national standard that requires not only population but also other standards.
In NJ both major parties appoint four people to a committee, but the tie-breaker vote is usually a professor or judge with not iron in the fire. The result for us is usually incumbent protection rather than partisan rancor.
A 25 year term is enough. A generation is enough.
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I have recently learned that Rooseveltâs attempt to âstackâ the court, by demanding that judges over 70 voluntarily resign or another member would be added to the court was a purely political move to stop the Court from destroying every facet of the New Deal, which it was systematically and pretty arbitrarily doing.
The Court backed down, and guess what was one thing FDR saved by this manoeuvre: Social Security.
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âAsked if justices should not have lifetime appointments, 41 percent âstronglyâ agreed and 28 percent âsomewhatâ agreed. Just 18 percent disagreed, 8 percent âstronglyâ and 10 percent âsomewhat.â Twelve percent werenât sure.â
41+28+18+8+12 = 107
Thatâs some interesting math
Here is the thing, though. Presidential and, to a lesser degree, Senate races have become increasingly more about the makeup of the Court. Interestingly enough, that has happened at the same time that the Court has become more vocal and visible in the media and become more partisan in its rulings.
So while I agree with you that setting term limits would ratchet up the partisanship in the process even more and thus make the Court more partisan, the original reasoning behind life time appointments has fallen by the wayside.
The Roberts Court is an utter embarrassment.
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The Court isnât supposed to represent you. You elect people to represent you. The Court is suppose to judge matter of purely law.
Now in reality, they stray from that concept quite often, and so there is indeed value in having issues viewed at with many different sets of eyes, with a wide array of backgrounds.
Part of the problem in achieving that is due to having a two party system, but thatâs another discussion.
UhhhhâŚ
So it should be 41 + 28 + 18 (the 10 somewhat + 8 strongly) + 12, coming out to 99.
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LIfetime appointments to anything during Mooreâs Law is a bad idea. The know-nothingism creeps into the âbright mindsâ of even a SCOTUS justice.
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Justices should have annual brain scans (with results made public)
to determine if Alzheimers Disease is affecting their judgement.
âŚis just another word for gerrymanderingâŚ
I say every 2 years at the beginning of congress, one appointment is made. So, yes part of each election is about the court, but it is only one member.
Cameras
Poll: 70 Percent Want To Abolish Lifetime Tenure At Supreme Court
I believe they call that the Scalia Effect.
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