"The Supreme Court’s attacks on voting rights are about rigging elections for Republicans," said Rep. Greg Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Because we’ve never had a case where the most-unpopular President in history was able to rush judicial nominees through the Senate and stack the Court with political hacks who have been credibly accused of sexual assault and drunkenness. The Senate has totally saved us from that.
If we had 18-year terms, we’d have 4 Obama appointees, 2 Biden, and 3 Trump right now. So it would still be 6-3, but the other direction, and it would represent the medium-long term political viewpoint of the American people, not the newest short-term reactionary position that a 6-year term would provide.
18-year terms is a good idea. I just feel uneasy about a bad justice serving that long. Mathematicians should be given the problem of coming up with the smallest number that would prevent a single President from appointing a majority. They would be allowed to change the number of justices.
Bad justices serve for life now. Bad Presidents can stack the Court with bad justices with terms shorter than 18 years.
And the terms aren’t based on the number of justices, but how long a President serves. A President can usually serve up to 8 years. No matter how many justices you have, having shorter terms would allow a President to stack the court. If you have 100 justices with 16 year terms, an 8-year President would get to change 50 of them. At 18-year terms, they could only nominate 4. And more importantly, they’d automatically get to nominate 4. So you can’t have this bullshit situation where we’ve the majority of the electorate vote for a Republican President twice in the last 34 years, but somehow have 2/3 of the justices appointed by Republicans.
That scenario would involve Congress and his nominated justices going along. Longer term limits would mean a bad justice staying for a long time.
Because we’ve never had a case where the most-unpopular President in history was able to rush judicial nominees through the Senate and stack the Court with political hacks who have been credibly accused of sexual assault and drunkenness. The Senate has totally saved us from that.
If we had 18-year terms, we’d have 4 Obama appointees, 2 Biden, and 3 Trump right now. So it would still be 6-3, but the other direction, and it would represent the medium-long term political viewpoint of the American people, not the newest short-term reactionary position that a 6-year term would provide.
18-year terms is a good idea. I just feel uneasy about a bad justice serving that long. Mathematicians should be given the problem of coming up with the smallest number that would prevent a single President from appointing a majority. They would be allowed to change the number of justices.
Bad justices serve for life now. Bad Presidents can stack the Court with bad justices with terms shorter than 18 years.
And the terms aren’t based on the number of justices, but how long a President serves. A President can usually serve up to 8 years. No matter how many justices you have, having shorter terms would allow a President to stack the court. If you have 100 justices with 16 year terms, an 8-year President would get to change 50 of them. At 18-year terms, they could only nominate 4. And more importantly, they’d automatically get to nominate 4. So you can’t have this bullshit situation where we’ve the majority of the electorate vote for a Republican President twice in the last 34 years, but somehow have 2/3 of the justices appointed by Republicans.
Correct.
Ah, and as we’ve all seen that could never happen… 🙄