What do you prefer in a Supreme Court Justice?

You've presented a deliberate mischaracterization of the options. The other option is someone who views the Constitution as a "living document" that adapts to the times. After all, it was written by political geniuses who would've pooped themselves if they saw an airplane. To treat their words as sacrosanct and unyielding to the modern era is akin to finding the textual justification to create the Republic of Gilead.

Do you believe that any Constitutional amendment after the Bill of Rights should exist? If so, how do you justify their addition, which goes beyond the original intent of the founders?

 

Correct answer.

 

I just got a vision of Ben F taking a **** in his pants at the sound of a helicopter. Thanks for that.

 

There's really no such thing as a "textualist" Supreme Court.

At the end of the day this is people interpreting other people.

There will always be grey area to navigate, no matter how much you think or hope otherwise.

If they navigate the grey area to the left, the right screams activist.

If they navigate the grey area to the right, the left screams activist. (although they really don't, but they should)

Rarely ever do SC justices issue overtly and flagrantly politically motivated rulings.

Since we have a broken political system designed for absolute gridlock and incapable of passing meaningful Constitutional reform, at this point I hope the SC does what is best for the country, not what is best for their job description.

 

Hard to take a poll seriously when one of the options is "someone who pushes a political agenda"

 

The correct answer has already been stated in this thread.

The real poll question should be do you want a judge who is completely beholden to guidelines written when buying and selling human beings was legal, and 4 gunshots in a minute was quick fire.

Or do you want a judge that interprets the rules to the best of their ability considering the modern world we live in (not the 18th century). That does not need a political agenda. You poll was deliberately loaded with your option and an option with clearly negative connotations.

 

Presidents from both parties nominate USSC justices with political biases. Trump nominated one with an extreme conservative bias and to date has decided as an extreme conservative that favored republican positions. And it is fully expected that trump will nominate another extreme conservative who will decide with positions that fully favor republican positions.

And... any justice that votes to overturn precedence is doing so with a political agenda and as such is an activist judge.

 

I would prefer a deeply experienced moderate, Judge Merrick Garland.

 

What I would prefer is someone that would help overturn Citizens United, and also overturn the idea that money = free speech.

Those two things have given lobbyists so much power and taken it away from actual people, that the politicians are not the servants of people but of big money interests.

That way we could set a hard limit on how much campaigns could spend. Both sides would spend the same, and it would give more power back to the people of our nation than anything else of which I can think.

It would make politics a much less ugly place, and I believe increase participation in our democracy.

 

I prefer a Constitutional Conservative. Judges should not legislate from the bench.

 

This answer is a cop out and ignores history. The 13th Amendment was passed after the Civil War when half of the states were being run under Reconstruction-era governments. Do you really think that the 13th Amendment would've passed Congress had the South never seceded?

Our system of checks and balances means that one branch can act to counter obstinance from another. One of the most important examples of this is Brown v. Board of Education. Do you think that the makeup of Congress in the 1950s and 1960s would've allowed legislation that barred "separate but equal" to pass? Should the immorality of that law been allowed to persist for a few more decades, under the assumption that Congress would've eventually gotten around to doing the right thing, or was the Court correct in "legislating from the bench" and finding a violation of the 14th Amendment?

Your false dichotomy in the poll also ignores judicial respect for precedent. It assumes that presidents nominate candidates who have made it far enough in their legal careers to completely ignore precedent in their rulings and still get a SCOTUS nomination. You may see a case like Obergefell v. Hodges as "judicial activism" when, in reality, it was a case carefully built on decades of precedent, beginning with Lawrence v. Texas. In fact, Lawrence should be a case that conservatives applaud because it denied the ability of the state to police the liberty of consenting adults and their private behavior. But the affirmation of that individual liberty was the underpinning of a case that social conservatives eventually came to see as "judicial activism." What was the Court to do when states were actively discriminating against consenting adults whose liberty was upheld in Lawrence? Should they have allowed this dual legal reality to exist in the face of discriminatory state legislatures? This isn't to say that precedent should be binding; obviously, Brown and Lawrence both struck down SCOTUS prior rulings. But those prior rulings (Plessy v. Ferguson and Bowers v. Hardwick) were at one time deemed to be constitutional. Should they have remained intact forever once that was decided according to originalist interpretation?

 

Agree.

And what many miss, on the Roe v Wade topic, is that a conservative would also highly value precedent (at least a legal conservative would).

personally, I don't think Roe v Wade is going to come up, or get overturned. Saw an analyst yesterday indicate that Obamacare legislation more likely to come up before the SC, and that is where the new justice will likely play a role.

 

What was that you were saying? It got drowned out in a sea of political ads....