Honestly, I thought the idea of court packing was horrible the first time I heard it, but the more Republicans continue to act like they have some sort of moral authority after the chicanery of Marek Garland vs Amy Coney Barrett, the more I think anything goes. I'm not totally against it anymore. It honestly would have only taken the least bit of shame at their own duplicity for me to continue thinking that it was a bad idea, but they seem incapable of even understanding why Dems could possibly take issue with what they did.
Sounds reasonable in the abstract. 1) The Court as an unelected lifetime legislature is a major contributor to "grid lock".2) The alleged "intent" of the Framers is a fetish that needs to be abandoned. 3) This power to completely null laws has in traditional high school civics been justified as being good to protect the rights of minorities. However, for the most part in history the main protected "minority" has been first slave holders and second the rich. 3) While it is true that without packing or reform, Congress can eventually bend the 5 majority on the Court to the will of the people as was done under Roosevelt when they justices suddenly saw precedents and the "intent" differently, they can hold up things for decades. 4) Rulings like the Court creating a free speech right to unlimited billionaire money to elect the Senate and President the Justices is a travesty and given the super majorities and choke points in the original document are incredibly hard to reverse. 5) In 1789 Justices typically lived to 55 and without modern medicine typically did not work till death so the typical term was iirc 10-14 years as they did not appoint 25 year olds. 6) Whether States can follow Federal laws is a distinct issue, but does raise the issue that we need to have Congress's power to prescribe exactly how Federal elections are run must be reasserted so that we do not have the bs of each state having its own rules to elect the US Senate, House and President.
Actually Marbury only "settled it" for the moment and it was disagreed almost always by Lincoln and many others until about 1950, when, after Roosevelt caused the Court to accept the will of the majority, the issue died until now. BTW per Moyn perhaps no other democracy allows this type of power to a S. Ct.
Is that what the article said? My link must be broken. Anyhow, I'm not against changing SCOTUS if whoever is in power has the will to do it. I don't think it's completely accurate to say SCOTUS is a gridlock contributor due to its structure, but more like it's just random depending on which president gets lucky with how many appointments they get to make. I think the FDR threat, which is generally accepted as changing the court direction, is debated by many historians - I probably need to read up on that. I don't think I have any major criticism of those ideas other than every branch has its issues. SCOTUS at times has been a hinderance to good (Dred Scott for example), but of course has also been a push for good where Congress or the President has failed. I'm all for changing the lifetime appointment thing, but that's very hard to do unless you have major political will.
Soros for The Left. Koch for The Right... Aren't multibillionaires fair? Opinion | Charles Koch’s Big Bet on Barrett Charles Koch has activated his political network to support Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination, and to tip the scales on her nomination battle in the U.S. Senate. While much of the commentary about Judge Barrett’s nomination has focused on the real prospect that Roe v. Wade may be undermined or overturned, Mr. Koch has other concerns. Judge Barrett’s nomination is the latest battleground in his decades-long war to reshape American society in a way that ensures that corporations can operate with untrammeled freedom. It may be a pivotal one. Since the early 1970s, Mr. Koch has sought to dismantle most federal regulatory institutions, and the federal courts have been central to that battle. In 1974, Mr. Koch gave a blistering speech to a libertarian think tank, called the Institute for Humane Studies, in which he outlined his vision of the American regulatory state, and the strategy he would employ over the ensuing decades to realize that vision. On the list of government interventions he condemned were “confiscatory taxation, wage and price controls, commodity allocations programs, trade barriers, restrictions on foreign investments, so-called equal opportunity requirements, safety and health regulations, land use controls, licensing laws, outright government ownership of businesses and industries.” As if that list were not exhaustive enough, he added, “… and many more interventions.” In short, Charles Koch believes that an unregulated free market is the only sustainable structure for human society. To achieve his goal, Mr. Koch has built an influence network with three arms: a phalanx of lobbyists; a constellation of think tanks and university programs; and Americans for Prosperity, a grass-roots army of political activists. And shaping the U.S. judiciary has been part of Mr. Koch’s strategy from the beginning. In that 1974 speech, he recommended a strategy of “strategically planned litigation” to test the regulatory authority of government agencies. Such lawsuits could make their way to the Supreme Court, where justices could set precedent. In the 1990s, he focused on lower-level judges, funding a legal institute that paid for judges to attend junkets at a Utah ski resort and Florida beachfront properties; the judges attended seminars on the importance of market forces in society and were warned against consideration of “junk science” — like specific methods to measure the effects of pollution — that plaintiffs used to prove corporate malfeasance. Mr. Koch also sought to influence the judiciary at the federal level. Between 1997 and 2017, the Koch brothers gave more than $6 million to the Federalist Society, a nonprofit institute that recruits libertarian and conservative judges for the federal judiciary, according to a tally by the activist group Greenpeace. Mr. Koch’s efforts on the Supreme Court intensified after Donald Trump’s election, when a Republican-controlled Senate opened the way to install judges who could tip the court’s ideological balance. Americans for Prosperity undertook national campaigns to support President Trump’s previous Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. A.F.P. said the Kavanaugh campaign alone — fliers, digital ads and staff for phone banking and door knocking — ran into “seven figures.” Now, Americans for Prosperity is doing the same for Judge Barrett. A.F.P. activists are pressuring U.S. senators in several states, with a particular eye toward vulnerable Democrats like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. The group is also working in Alaska, where Republican Lisa Murkowski has given mixed signals about whether she is willing to vote on Judge Barrett’s nomination before the next president is elected. Mr. Koch is selective about where he spends on politics, and the returns to reshaping the Supreme Court could dwarf the millions he’s invested. The court plays a pivotal role in determining how much regulatory power the federal government has over corporate America. The closest the Supreme Court has come to reflecting Mr. Koch’s vision for regulation is the “Lochner era” of the early 20th century, during which an activist court struck down a wide range of federal regulations on business, turning the country into a free market free-fire zone. A Supreme Court that has swung hard to the right could reverse earlier decisions and issue new ones that create something like a new Lochner era. In the world of corporate law, the lodestar legal case is Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. This case, decided in 1984, created an important legal precedent called “Chevron deference.” It holds that courts should generally defer to an agency’s interpretation of a law enacted by Congress when the law is ambiguous (provided that the agency interpretation is reasonable). This helps empower agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency to operate complex regulatory regimes, even if some details are not specifically detailed in the law. The current Supreme Court has signaled a willingness to reconsider this precedent, a move that could dramatically weaken federal regulatory agencies. Mr. Koch and the Trump administration are united in their desire to undo the Chevron decision. Mark Holden, a board member of Americans for Prosperity, has publicly decried Chevron deference as a tool of tyranny. “The administrative state is often fundamentally at odds with our carefully crafted constitutional order,” Mr. Holden, then general counsel for Koch Industries, wrote in a 2018 op-ed essay for The Hill. He said the legal precedent gave agencies like E.P.A. so much power that they consolidated the authority of all three branches of government under one roof: Passing rules, enforcing them and then handing down verdicts in administrative courts. At the White House, a former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, said the Trump administration sought to appoint Supreme Court justices who would rein in the independent agencies. Justice Gorsuch, for example, wrote multiple appeals court opinions that echoed Mr. Holden’s views. The Koch network apparently has faith that Judge Barrett will rule in concert with these beliefs. This is something of a gamble. She has been a federal judge for only three years, leaving a short paper trail of cases and academic work from which to deduce her views. Judge Barrett’s legal writings do point toward one important idea: She, like many judges, appears to believe that some precedents which the court has created with its decisions should be overturned. Judge Barrett has publicly said that her judicial philosophy is the same as former Justice Antonin Scalia. As Lisa Heinzerling, a law professor at Georgetown, told The Washington Post, what this signals depends on which version of Justice Scalia Judge Barrett agrees with. Justice Scalia was a supporter of Chevron deference early in his tenure, but became more skeptical of it over time as he defended the power of courts to undo or weaken acts of Congress. The Americans for Prosperity campaign literature supporting Judge Barrett does not appear to mention the Chevron case, nor any other ruling about corporate power. One Facebook ad simply says that she is “committed to our Constitution, and that she won’t legislate from the bench.” Spokesmen for A.F.P. echo that line, emphasizing that the Koch network isn’t looking for policy outcomes, but for honest jurists who will follow the Constitution to the letter. History shows that it is just as effective to legislate from the bench by striking down laws as by upholding them. The Lochner era proves that policy negation is just as powerful as creation, and it affects just as many lives. As Charles Koch has written and stated so often in the past five decades, there are many, many laws and programs that he would like to negate. With the nomination of Judge Barrett to the court, he appears to be closer than ever to achieving this goal. Christopher Leonard (@CLeonardNews) is the author of “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” and director of the Watchdog Writers Group at the Missouri School of Journalism.
Symbolic waste of time, correct? They don't have the votes to get this through. Someone should let them know that Americans are losing their jobs and are unable to pay rent and put food on the table, maybe they should try to negotiate with the Trump administration and Pelosi instead of wasting their time on some bills that won't even pass.
He’s going to study it (broader reform of the court system) with inputs from many. Seems very reasonable to me.
Wait, wait. He’s going to have a deliberative process where he takes in input and encourages serious discussion? This seems vaguely familiar... maybe from when I traveled abroad or something?
Add 2 justices? My number would be 4 or 6 - bye bye conservative majority, as I do not trust Roberts in the face of GOP political interest The GOP has too often abused the judiciary as a political tool to go against the wishes of the people. If it is worth doing at all, its worth doing exceedingly well.
I think even the presence of a commission like this will make the 6 Right Wing justices on the court sit up straighter than they've ever sat before. I think this process will be good for Democracy, and if anything, it'll put the court on its best behavior for a year or so one would think.
Late to the party: 4 of the 8 Justices were appointed by Presidents that lost the popular vote. That does not reflect the will of the people but just the will of the gerrymanderers, Senate obstructionist and targeted campaigners. Adding Justices restores the balance the Framer's envisioned. The Barrett Court is an anomaly and likely to overturn Roe v. Wade and Affordable Care when a vast majority oppose that, as well as ignoring legal precedent as a guiding principle.
Pack the court and get rid of filibuster as well. In the future, every party that have the white house as well as senate should pack the court, until one day the constitution amendment is made. We do not need useless things like norms, history and precedence, as long as i is legal, it is good to go. I think half the country would be perfectly fine if we do not have a functioning government.
Ms Barrett, the woman being shoved through the confirmation process during a presidential election for the first time in the history of the United States, by Republican Senators Mitch "The b****" McConnell and Lindsey "The Weasel" Graham, kept some important information from the Senate during her hearing. From Associated Press: Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett served for nearly three years on the board of private Christian schools that effectively barred admission to children of same-sex parents and made it plain that openly gay and lesbian teachers weren’t welcome in the classroom. The policies that discriminated against LGBTQ people and their children were in place for years at Trinity Schools Inc., both before Barrett joined the board in 2015 and during the time she served. The three schools, in Indiana, Minnesota and Virginia, are affiliated with People of Praise, an insular community rooted in its own interpretation of the Bible, of which Barrett and her husband have been longtime members. At least three of the couple’s seven children have attended the Trinity School at Greenlawn, in South Bend, Indiana. The AP spoke with more than two dozen people who attended or worked at Trinity Schools, or former members of People of Praise. They said the community’s teachings have been consistent for decades: Homosexuality is an abomination against God, sex should occur only within marriage and marriage should only be between a man and a woman. Interviewees told the AP that Trinity’s leadership communicated anti-LGBTQ policies and positions in meetings, one-on-one conversations, enrollment agreements, employment agreements, handbooks and written policies — including those in place when Barrett was an active member of the board. Trinity Schools Inc. is a tax-exempt non-profit organization that receives some financial support from government-funded tuition voucher programs, according to its federal tax returns. https://apnews.com/article/south-be...ota-virginia-a8bbabea9ee4d2fb13c6079c09f2f075
