Even if they’re all friendly with each other and have respect for their polar opposites, this sounds extremely difficult and very unlikely.
It’s also slightly problematic because we have more than 2 parties, even though only 2 dominate. I think we’d be much better off with a more-than-two party system, which at this point requires ranked voting across the board. If we had more independent or moderate presidents nominating unbiased / moderate judges to the court, that could solve the problem.
Except that does not prevent the party controlling the senate from obstructing by simply voting against every nominee of a POTUS that is not of their own party. I remember in 2016, some senator who was effectively predicting Hillary to win, claim that he’d keep the seat vacant for 4 years or more if need be.
Anything would be better than the expansion of the court floated around by Dems. Along with removing the Fillibuster for all senate votes, this effectively ties the executive (POTUS), the legislative (Congress) and ensures that even the Judiciary (SCOTUS) is controlled by a single party at a time. Cue extreme laws with no railguards and even wilder swings in policies and laws when the controlling party switches.
This could work provided that the initial state was fairly balanced. If you started from a 6 GOP + 3 Dems Justices, it’d just ensure the status quo around that conservative balance forever. If you started after Dems add 4 or 6 extra Justices, it’d stay liberal forever.
I agree that RCV could alleviate things but it’s also very unlikely because those with the most to lose out of it (Dems and GOP) have all the chips and are unlikely to let their control slip. It’s been tried at various levels and repealed many times because it doesn’t ensure that incumbents keep their seats comfortably.
For this to change, I think that term limits need to be implemented at all levels first, starting with Congress then state legislatures. Once you get that out of the way, then I think that RCV and the effective emergence of more parties may become possible. Even then with lifetime appointments to SCOTUS, you’re leaving it to chance as far as the composition of the court is concerned. Maybe that tenure could also be shortened a bit from lifetime to maybe 15-20 years. A generation should be more than enough.
Or maybe we could have ranked-choice voting for the 10 Justices to determine the tie-breaker Justice. Nobody will get their first choice but down the line a more moderate tie-breaker Justice should emerge. And like Glitch mentioned, I’d trust those Justices to put legal competency over partisanship if pushed to choose a compromise tie-breaker Justice.
(stolen from reddit)
Biden is now saying how filling the current vacancy is “packing the court” and “unconstitutional”.
“Look, the only court-packing is going on right now. It’s going on with the Republicans packing the court now. It’s not constitutional what they’re doing,” said Biden while traveling to Pennsylvania for a campaign stop.
“The fact is that the only packing going on is this court is being packed now by the Republicans after the vote has already begun,” he added.
I guess he’s one of those liberals who always likes to interpret the constitution to mean what he wants it mean, because his view sure isn’t what it says. Clearly he’s laying the groundwork to justify his own court packing plans.
The GOP is packing the court by refusing to even allow a Democratic nominee in the last Presidential term and reserving the spot for a GOP nominee. They are not acting on principle as they violated their own principle of not appointing a justice within a year of an election. So, yes, it is court packing. They are speeding up the nomination process much faster than usual. They have also been preventing nominations for lower courts, and then passing nominations at record speed when it’s a conservative appointee.
Republicans do have a history of packing state Supreme Courts and attempting to pack SCOTUS. They have sometimes been successful. They have also unpacked courts, reducing the number of judges to prevent the other party from appointing judges.
If you studied this, you would know, and not just give partial propaganda posts.
I’ve studied the history enough to know nearly all of your claims are false. It’s just politicians following the rules and doing what’s best for their party when they have the votes, no different when the democrats were in that position in the past.
Huh? So you’re saying the GOP Senate gave Merrick Garland a hearing? It was the first time in history a Supreme Court nominee was refused a hearing. Everything I said in that post was true and factual. GOP leaders said publicly they were blocking him so they could nominate one they wanted if a GOP President came in. They said this many months before the election.
GOP leaders say this is exactly what they are doing, publicly. It’s not a secret.
What planet are you from?
In Florida, Iowa and other states, Republican legislatures have changed the rules for judicial nominating commissions to give governors more control. High-court justices have been threatened with impeachment for issuing rulings that legislatures didn’t like.
Some Republican legislatures also have added seats to their states’ supreme courts to create new conservative majorities that are still in power today. In 2016, for example, Republicans in Georgia added two seats to the state Supreme Court to create a new conservative majority, giving GOP Gov. Nathan Deal two appointments.
Republicans in Arizona did the same thing that year, adding two high-court seats to allow GOP Gov. Doug Ducey’s appointments to create a new conservative majority. Ducey then manipulated the Arizona Constitution’s rules for appointing the state’s judicial nominating commission in an effort to push the court further to the right.
Around the same time, Republican legislators in North Carolina floated the idea of adding two seats to their state’s Supreme Court. The suggestion came during a December 2016 lame-duck session, just weeks after voters had elected a new progressive majority to the high court along with a Democratic governor. This court packing plan led to protests and criticism from across the ideological spectrum, since it would have undone the results of the election. Legislators didn’t follow through.
a few years earlier the Legislature had voted to “unpack” the North Carolina Court of Appeals, eliminating three soon-to-be-vacant seats before the state’s Democratic governor could fill them. The court would have been left with an even number of judges. A Republican judge resigned in protest, and the Legislature recently repealed the change.
Of course they are… GOP has the Senate & the President in control.
It’s the right way & the democrats would follow along in the same direction if they could.
"During Obama’s last two years as president, the McConnell-led Senate majority confirmed the fewest judges in more than half a century, including only two appellate court judges. All told, McConnell and his conservative Senate allies held open more than [110 judicial seats](Vacancy Summary for January 2017 | United States Courts) by the end the Obama presidency. Conservative senators made clear that had Trump not won, efforts to hold seats open would have continued.
"After first preventing President Obama from appointing judges, they changed the nomination and confirmation process rules so that the most partisan conservative judges can be appointed at breakneck speed. First, conservative Senate leaders invoked the so-called nuclear option to allow Supreme Court justices to be confirmed through majority votes. Then they cut home-state senators out of the judicial nominations process, ending a century-old tradition of giving those senators a say in the judges that were confirmed. To further speed the process, they stopped working with the American Bar Association (ABA) to determine whether nominees were qualified to be judges, resulting in Trump nominating six nominees that the ABA deemed “not qualified.” In addition, they broke the Senate committee review process by packing hearings and markups with too many nominees to properly vet, including doing so twice when the Senate was actually in recess.
Now, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to accelerate the court packing process. He is moving forward with a “new nuclear option to speed Trump judges” that would reduce debate time on federal district court judges from 30 hours down to just two.
Not satire. The Taliban are Trump supporters:
“A senior Taliban member told CBS News, “Trump might be ridiculous for the rest of the world, but he is sane and wise man for the Taliban.””
I think he just has his own definition of “court packing”. Consider the delays in 2016 and the rush now, and it’s understandable to be miffed (even if only because they were outplayed).
Isn’t that rather obvious? When the rest of the world is focused on watching that crazy American sideshow, no one’s paying attention to what those pesky terrorists are up to.
It’s a commentary on the gawking, not Trump.
Why are you citing some racist progressive nonsense as your source? That’s worse than Russian propaganda. If I wanted racist navel-gazing, I would have majored in grievance studies. dismissed!
Racial disparities in wealth are not a result of individual or family choices but rather the result of structural racism in American public policy.
The U.S. economy was built on the exploitation and occupational segregation of people of color.
Nobody’s going to achieve anything thinking that way, but that’s the mindset of your progressive think tank.
This is not a mindset, this is the conclusion of many studies by multiple economists who studied the subject. If you listened to any economics podcasts, you might have known about it.
So says you. Others would say that you have to understand the root of the problem before you can look for solutions.
Meanwhile, Democratic Senate hopefuls now appear competitive in previously safe states such as Kansas and South Carolina. In North Carolina, the party’s political prospects are only looking brighter after a sexting scandal involving Cal Cunningham, the Democrat trying to unseat Tillis.
LOL. I’m not sure which party this refers to, but I suspect what I said earlier is true – the sex scandal is making Cal more popular with Republicans 
So you, or these economists you like, don’t think individual choice can lead to more or less wealth? That poor minorities are predestined to be poor regardless of what they do? Are they a bunch of Calvinists as well as Marxists who think this stuff up?
If these guys can’t come up with anything better to cry “racism” than micro aggressions and disparate impact and systemic nonsense (none of which conveniently require any causal proof), they’ve got nothing. The US is so racist a country we elected a black guy to the highest office, twice. Meanwhile, BLM committed about $2B worth of macro aggressions.
