Is it time to restore the Supreme Court to legitimacy?

Court-packing, Sanders told MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle during an event titled "Our Rights, Our Courts," would produce a kind of death spiral for the Supreme Court.

"We add two more judges. The next guy comes in — maybe a Republican — somebody comes in, you have two more," and before you know it, he said, "you have 87 members of the Supreme Court. And I think that delegitimizes the Court."

- Don't take it from HTM, take it from Bernie.

 

Then make a case to the American people, elect members of Congress/executive branches at the state and national level and codify it.

Starting a SCOTUS death spiral is ill advised.

 

You keep saying this but haven't explained what that will look like at all.

It sounds like pure fantasy to me.

 

Yea... that's how packing a court works... now explain the part where somehow it ends and the court is reconstituted in a "legitimate" manner.

 

repealing roe and allowing some states to force women who were raped to carry a child minutes after theorized conception is vile and disgusting.

abortion for things like that is part of Judaism /rights for women and actually infringes on their religious freedom.

I’m a conservative but this is a bad move. I get leaving it up to states but the above scenario and pre conditions should have come with it.

people aren’t always in charge of who ****s then, and if you have a uterus it could really take one traumatic experience and turn it into something on steroids

 

Go look at the state Supreme Courts. Packing has been done fairly recently. Senate Republicans refusing to give a SC nominee even a hearing is effectively the same as unpacking and then rushing in a nominee for the Court on against their own logic is effectively the same as packing. And if you look back at history (yes before the Civil war), packing and unpacking were common. Republicans got no ethical, moral or any ground to complain about the Dem packing the Court (if they dare to do what they should).

Yet you and many others, liberals included think and believe this Court would take precedent seriously and not overturn it. I personally was not sure.

The legitimacy of the court is already broken and Americans' rights to living freely in modern society may already be destroyed, especially if this Court does what it should logically do next (why shouldn't it?) - take away rights to Contraception, Same-Sex Marriage, and consensual sexual acts between same-sex individuals. They all stand on the same ground as Roe. Thomas is logically consistent when he said they all should be revisited (strike down).

I hope it's a super-majority that does it as related to reforming the Court. But as related to legislation in general, the filibuster needs to go. It has been long abused to do nothing more than obstruction as a norm causing the government to be barely functional.

Dem do need to win elections and as I said, if they win the super majority (on this issue), they need to do what voters gave them the power to do.

 

Some of us yelled at how important that election was b/c of exactly this - there was a good chance that the 2016 election result winner will choose the next 3 SC Justices. Trump won because of this - conservatives understood the historical importance of the election and held their disgust and voted for a morally bankrupt person. Dem and Independent didn't. Something about a mail server. That's unforgiving but their future rights - nay, the Court wouldn't go that far. What's done is done and they still have the power to undo this.

 

from 2018:

The Case Against Court-Packing Revisited
Current liberal court-packing proposals are dangerously misguided - and for much the same reasons as last year's conservative court-packing plan.

https://reason.com/volokh/2018/07/03/the-case-against-court-packing-revisited/

excerpt:

Last year, ironically, it was a conservative court-packing plan that made waves in legal circles - one offered by famed conservative legal scholar Steven Calabresi (in a paper coauthored with Shams Hirji), who hoped to pack the lower federal courts with Republican judges. Most of what I wrote in criticism of the Calabresi-Hirj plan applies equally to today's progressive versions of the idea:

If either the Republicans... or the Democrats.... succeed in packing the courts, the opposing party is sure to do exactly the same thing the next time they control the White House and both Houses of Congress. This is even more likely if court-packing can be enacted through the reconciliation process (as Calabresi and Hirj argue), and thus requires only a narrow Senate majority to pass.

Ending the norm against court-packing ensures that the judiciary will not serve as an effective check on the other branches of government at the very time when it is most likely to be needed: when one party holds both Congress and the presidency, and can thereby push through its agenda with relatively little opposition. Especially in a highly polarized era like our own, it is precisely at such times that the ruling party is [particularly] likely to violate constitutional constraints on its power in order to score victories against the hated opposition....

[T]he case against court-packing does not depend on the proclivities of any one president. As James Madison famously warned us: "Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." Indeed, dangerously unenlightened politicians are all too common. The norm against court-packing is an important bulwark against their depredations – and those of the political majorities who put them in power.​

I fully recognize that many Democrats regard court-packing as justified retaliation for the GOP's "theft" of the Supreme Court seat that went to Neil Gorsuch as a result of the Republican-controlled Senate's refusal to hold hearings and vote on Barack Obama nominee Merrick Garland. Republicans, in turn, argue that their treatment of Garland was justified by past Democratic misdeeds in the judicial nomination process (including refusal to hold hearings for a number of prominent GOP circuit court nominees), and that the Democrats themselves had signaled they would refuse to consider a GOP nominee in circumstances similar to those surrounding the Garland appointment. The truth is that, for a long time, both parties have shamelessly violated a variety of norms surrounding judicial nominations almost any time it seemed like they might gain an advantage to doing so. And both are equally shameless in shifting back and forth on procedural issues whenever the political winds dictate. The latest example is the contrast between GOP Senate leader Mitch NcConnell's insistence, in 2016, that the then-open Supreme Court seat should not be filled until after the November election, and his current claims that the present vacancy must be filled quickly, and certainly before the GOP might potentially lose its Senate majority in this fall's election.

But whatever we might think about the history of these shenanigans, court-packing is qualitatively different from any of them. Holding up nominees (as the GOP did with Garland), filibustering them (as the Democrats did with several Bush nominees, and as many - including Barack Obama - tried to do with Justice Samuel Alito), or "slow walking" them through the nomination process (many examples from both parties), are all potentially problematic. But all still leave the judiciary intact as a serious check on the power of the other branches of government. Court-packing, by contrast, would not. Once the norm against it is broken, both parties will resort to it whenever they have simultaneous control over Congress and the presidency, thereby foreclosing any significant judicial review of their policies.

***
Some liberal Democrats might still conclude that it's better to blow up judicial review than to leave that power to be exercised by a Court with a conservative majority. This would be an understandable, but shortsighted reaction. For all their serious differences and very real flaws, mainstream liberal and mainstream conservative jurists still agree on many important questions, including protection a wide range of freedom speech, basic civil liberties, and ensuring a modicum of separation of powers, among others. History shows that these are the sorts of restraints on government power that the executive (sometimes backed by Congress) is likely to break during times of crisis, or when they have much-desired partisan agendas to pursue. Such actions are especially likely if the president is a populist demagogue with authoritarian impulses. And, as the current occupant of the White House demonstrates, the safeguards against such people getting power are not nearly as strong as we might have thought before 2016. As specialists in comparative politics emphasize, it is no accident that court-packing is a standard tool of authoritarian populists seeking to undermine liberal democracy, recently used in such countries as Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela.

As a libertarian, I have a long list of reservations about both conventional liberal judges and conventional conservative ones. But even if the judiciary is staffed by flawed jurists, it is still a valuable safeguard against illiberalism and authoritarianism.

***
It is also important to recognize that much of what liberals fear at the hands of a conservative Supreme Court majority is the undermining of judicial protection for rights of special importance to progressives, such as the right to abortion (imperiled by a possible overruling of Roe v. Wade) and the right to same-sex marriage (which would be undermined by an overruling of Obergefell v. Hodges). For reasons well summarized by Josh Barro, I think it's actually highly unlikely that Obergefell would be overruled. Roe v. Wade is, I believe, far more likely to be overturned, or at least seriously weakened.

But both these rights - and others valued by liberals - would be far more imperiled if the entire institution of judicial review is gutted by court-packing. That would ensure that these rights would never again get significant judicial protection - at least not if their adversaries control Congress and the White House. The same applies to a wide range of other constitutional rights, especially those that protect unpopular minorities, who are especially likely to face a hostile president and Congress, sooner or later. Like most liberals, I hated the Supreme Court's recent travel ban decision. But undermining judicial review through court-packing is a great way to ensure that future presidents will continue to be able to institute whatever discriminatory travel ban policies they want. A flawed Supreme Court decision can be overruled in the future, as many have been. It will be much harder to restore the institution of judicial review, once that is lost.

Court-packing might still be attractive to people who believe that it's more important to eliminate "bad" judicial review as an obstacle to beneficial policies, than to preserve the "good" kind as an obstacle to oppressive ones. That theory has advocates on both right and left. This longstanding issue cannot be fully settled in a blog post. But I believe the history of American government - and government elsewhere - shows we have more to fear from state oppression than from excessive exercise of judicial review. Given widespread voter ignorance and prejudice, majority public opinion - and the politicians it elects - often cannot be trusted to avoid deeply oppressive and unjust policies. Judicial review cannot prevent all such wrongs, but it has historically done a good deal to at least alleviate them.

Court-packing was a terrible idea when FDR advocated it in 1937 and when some conservatives pushed it last year. It remains a terrible idea today.
​

more at the link

​

 

Comparing a guy on a Rockets forum to Draymond is a cardinal sin no matter how big of an asswipe they are.

 

It's much easier (not that it's easy at all) to win at the federal level to undo all these damages. Many states are so politically gerrymandered that voters have very little voice. We can thx that to the SC ruling in 2019 (5-4 along partisan lines). They knew it was blatantly against constitutional democracy but didn't care. That ruling should be overturned as well.

 

When Mitch gamed the system he already packed the court. If you can find a time machine, maybe you can prevent it and save the court. We are already spiraling. You guys are just trying to stop it while you are ahead.

If you were concerned about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, the time to do something about it was 4 years ago.

It's like shooting someone in the face and then screaming, "stop the violence". Self-serving hypocrisy.

 

Even if no one is ever incentivized to fix the 87 justice clown court, I'm fine with that. Supreme Court is OP. In the early days of court packing, a president can get whatever he wants by nominating 2 or 4 more justices. But, as the numbers grow, the existing population of justices becomes harder to predict and appointing just a couple more doesn't necessarily get what you want. Also, with a small court, a little block of guys can organize to plan together to change the future of the country, but in a large court a political ecosystem will develop. Justices will jockey with each other, barter for support and so on. It'll perversely be more democratic only because as the population of the Court approaches the population of the country, it's representativeness will approach 100%. It'd look like the House of Representatives, but instead of everyone going to the voter every 2 years, it's sadly an elite class of oligarchs. Which is what the Supreme Court is anyway, but each one becomes less elite the more of them there are. Perhaps Biden should fast forward to peak ridiculousness by nominating all US citizens to be Justices. But the crux is this: Supreme Court is one of our forefathers' poorer ideas. It's undemocratic, anti-republican, lacks accountability, and insulated from reform. So the only practical solution is to sabotage it.

 

I can't express how vehemently I disagree with this. If this is a widely-held Democratic belief, then I amend my earlier comment that Democrats and Republicans pose equal threats to democracy and now locate that threat much more firmly on the side of the Democrats

 

So currently Democrats pose a small threat to our Democracy, Republicans place a large one. Switch about ten people in certain positions and Republicans would have already done it. They are the only party that actually tried to do it in the modern era. They nearly succeeded.

Removing the Supreme Court is an interesting discussion but purely theoretical.

 

I doubt I reflect widely-held Democratic beliefs. I'm usually an odd duck. But, fear not, I'm sure Joe Manchin won't allow any of this to transpire anyway.