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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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The current president could name six Supreme Court Justices today, if the Democrats were better at this.
I know it feels good to say "Pack the court", but it would turn it into a clown show with every new president adding double what the previous president added.
Yes yes this is where you say it's already a clown show, and then I say it'd be even more, etc.
The Republicans will do whatever benefits them anyway. They haven't needed to expand the court because there's been a conservative majority for basically forever.
Limiting your actions because the Republicans will act in bad faith in the future is never going to get you anywhere.
"We go high when they go low." Has been the dumbest fucking slogan. Sorry, not sorry but that tactic backfired so badly that is hilarious. With these gullible fools we need to fight fire with fire. They don't respond to logic or reason. They respond to false "gotcha" moments and memes.
Should have been they go low we kick em in the teeth.
Yup. Until at some point the American people got fed up with the clown show. But some of us have been waiting for them to get fed up with it for quite some time. Maybe this would exasperate the issue to the point where we actually do something.
Accelerationism is certainly one ideology dumber than the current status quo.
Please give me a hypothetical example of how "the American people" can actually change the fundamental structure of the 3 branches of government. Like seriously, I would love to know how.
Constitutional Convention enacted by State Governors and State Legislatures with the support of the majority of each states population.
So if enough people in every state complained about SCOTUS to their state legislature, the state legislature can force the people's opinion up to the Governors who can do something at the federal level? I guess I'm just not seeing the actual legal mechanism that would be used to force any kind of change.
My understanding is any change to the structure of government at that level requires 2/3rds congressional majority.
And people act like "the people" want this in the first place. Nearly half of "The people" voted for Trump, and probably will again. The US is not united against the fascists. Hell, in this thread itself, you have someone blaming the Dems for not waving a magic wand and somehow assigning 6 more scotus memberswhen we don't even have a majority in either the house or the senate, and taking such a drastic move with obvious dangers would certainly be objectionable to many.
Congratulations, the constitution now allows for the execution of gay people.
I'm not sure how people don't get this. There are already plenty of avenues for the creation of popular change in the current democratic system. The problems we have today largely exist because they are popular.
And how do we think that'd work out?
If we really did get to rip up the Constitution and start over, who do you think would get to write it? You think Bernie Sanders is just going to stroll up with a pen and start setting things straight?
Step 1 would be organizing and unionizing our workplaces (with a focus on strategic industries like food production, railways, construction... the stuff that really makes the gears turn). The next step would be aligning the collective bargaining contracts negotiated by those unions to expire at the same time. Solidarity strikes were made illegal in the US, so unions are only 'allowed' to strike against employers who employ their union members. The collective bargaining contract expiration dates would need to be far enough in the future to allow the union to build up a nice little strike fund, enough to pay each member a stipend to survive off of for a month or two. Then the unions and their members need to negotiate with each other and vote to decide on general strike demands to change the current system (my preference would be on revolutionary unionism to end capitalism and put industry in the hands of workers democratically, but you could also do things like change FPTP voting to something else, or really any demand you want to propose that you think could make our country better for us). Then when the contracts expire, the general strike begins. Unions issue their demands on behalf of the workers and the gears turn from there. The only real way to create fundamental change to the system is to use collective organizing and collective action. What I've said above is just one way to go about it and I think it's a pretty democratic way to do it, but there are definitely others (communist vanguard party, democratic socialism via electoral politics, etc.). The UAW is actually advocating for the general strike method and have set a date of May 1st, 2028 (international labor day) for other unions to align their contracts accordingly.
Not sure if that's an autocorrect, did you mean exacerbate?
packing the court would set the billionaires giving the court gifts back like 20 years. I don't buy the nonesense about how its a "norm" that's shit the media made up out of pocket. There used to be 6 justices. That is the original precedent.
Not quite.
If you mean that all six conservatives could be impeached today, there really is only damning evidence against two of them right now and impeachment has to start in the Republican-controlled House and get a 2/3 vote in the Senate, none of which have a chance of happening.
If you mean that Democrats could expand the Court to 15 today, that also has to go through the Republican House first, as well as centrist Democrats in both houses who might view that as too extreme. I am an advocate for expanding the Court, but I would stop at 13.
I also think 13 is a good number because that would be 1 Supreme Court justice for each circuit court
But getting to that will be hard and not to mention unless a cap is put in place (I prefer tying it to the number of circuit courts) then the next person who scoots in could expand it further with less push back due to it having been done just recently
The last thing we need is every president who scoots into office appointing more and more justices until it gets out of hand
I think an "arms race" that forever expands the court -- and thus dilutes the individual relevance of a single Justice -- is a good thing.
A single Justice dying or retiring should not be the sort of thing to reshape the entire country.
"A good thing" is too strong a statement, but I could agree with "not worse than the status quo."
The way you do it is to - BOOM! - expand the Court to 13 on Day 1 of the next Biden administration, if Democrats also have both houses of Congress, nuking the Fillibuster if necessary, but delay it's effect until September 2026.
Then, go to Republicans and give them a choice. Either we can reform the SC and institute meaningful reform, or Republicans can watch Biden appoint four judges in their 40's to lifetime appointments, and they can wait until they have the Presidency and both houses of Congress to make a tit-for-tat response. (Biden's appointments would only be subject to those term limits if the amendment passes before he makes the appointment.)
We can do a lot in an amendment, including instituting term limits, a firm code of ethics, a better process for confirmation where the Senate can't just ignore an appointment, and formally fixing the size of the SCOTUS to match the number of appellate courts.
Democrats are never as good at predicting something as they are when they are predicting the things they cannot accomplish
Or if he'd have six Justices assassinated as an official act, making him immune to prosecution according to the Republicans.
Obviously that's a terrible idea, but what is stopping a dictator from doing that in the US? The Supreme Court is the arbiter of whether things are legal. Literally what is stopping a dictatorial president from killing or threatening the Justices and replacing them with cronies?
Yet another argument for term limits on Justices.
Senate has to approve the replacements.
Threat of impeachment. Dems will vote for impeachment. Republicans will, too, if the president is a Democrat.
One, they haven't had the votes since Biden became President. Two, that doesn't fix anything. If we had 6 more liberal justices today they can't just say, "Hey, let's undo the bad decisions from the last 15 years." They need to address the issues that come before them in regular fashion. If the Democrats had the votes they need to just start codifying everything we take for granted AND institute reforms (e.g. no more fucking filibuster, no stock trades for elected officials, and a SCOTUS code of ethics).
Adding justices does fix one thing: more justices mean that for billionaires to bribe them it requires bribing a lot more of them.
You clearly underestimate how much money a billion dollars is. There's always enough money to bribe officials.
there's only hundreds of billionaires and 52 weeks in a year. Even if they can pay them all a 100 million each year you still have to spend time with them and take them on your yacht to you private sex trafficking island. It takes a lot more work than just the money up front. The direct gifts and freebies are just the tip of the iceberg.
The entirety of gifts received by the justices over the past 2 decades is about $3 million. About $2.4 million of that went to Clarence Thomas.
Thomas was bought for $120,000/year.
Even if that's just the tip of the iceberg, and the total monetary equivalent compensation were say, $1,000,000/yr... Over 20 years, that's still only 2% of a billion dollars.
It’s only around $100,000 to bribe justices. One billion dollars could bribe 100,000 justices at that rate.
And that rate is only that high because Clarence Thomas skews the numbers with how vast the bribes he has accepted have been.
You added a zero somewhere.
Also, it seems like justices are charging on the order of 1 million, so a billion dollars gets 1000 judges. Still plenty for them to get whatever they want.
Judges aren’t charging anywhere even close to a million dollars. You might be thinking of Clarence Thomas, who I pointed out as an outlier.
And even if I was off on my math, we aren’t getting more than 10,000 justices. Ever. Never. And even if we did, my math was based off only 1 billion dollars. A few people have MUCH more than that. So with that in mind, you’re going to need about 100,000 justices anyway just to outweigh the influence of money.
Oh, wow, sorry. It's just Thomas that's throwing it way off. My bad.
Also, I wasn't disagreeing with your point at all. You're absolutely right. Just that somewhere you had an extra zero, but it doesn't change your point at all: judges are cheap and a billionaire could easily buy them all for a small fraction of their wealth.
Don't worry, I've been told if we just keep electing right-wing corporate neolibs they'll eventually magically change one day and reverse their drift to the right.
No one has been able to actually articulate how that wotks, but that's the plan. Apparently.
just one more ~~lane~~ neolib and we'll finally fix ~~traffic~~ rightshifting bro