Corporate predators and their Republican lackeys want our corrupt Supreme Court to make fraud legal again. Their greed could yield catastrophic economic damage.
NO. STOP. Court expansion, especially a proposal to expand the court and *do nothing else*, is a *terrible* idea! At best, we'd be slapping a bandaid on a broken leg. If Democrats expand the court to get more seats, that just encourages everyone to treat the court as a partisan institution that is to be tilted in either direction whenever one party takes control of enough of the rest of the government to make it happen. All it does is give Republicans a free pass to do exactly the same thing the next time they hold power, and then we're back where we started.
There are three fundamental things that are needed for the Court to function as a healthy part of our democratic system:
1) Term limits, with senior status to allow coverage in the event of recusal or vacancy, and regular rotation of the Chief Justice position. The goal of this suite of reforms would be to cut down on the incentives to "steal" seats in the first place by putting in place well-defined caps on the value of each seat and ensuring that attempting to game the system cannot, in and of itself, cripple the Court. It also eliminates the "duty to sit" justification that Alito cowers behind in his refusal to recuse.
2) An active Congress capable of responding to court rulings - when the Court gets things wrong, or says that the political branches have failed to set up their policies correctly, those political branches need to actually respond to what happens. *Shelby County* left an obvious gap through which the preclearance requirement could be restored: replace the provisions targeting jurisdictions based on their 1965 characteristics with a formula that uses some general formula for detecting voter discrimination, and Roberts' entire position collapses. But for the past decade, Congress has declined to step through that gap. Qualified immunity is an entirely invented doctrine of the Court that Congress can erase at any time it chooses, but it continues to degrade our civil rights to this day.
3) Regular amendments to the Constitution as new issues emerge. The process is difficult and we are out of the habit, but it is worth remembering, especially in this period of founder-worship we find ourselves in, that the most important part of the Constitution always has been and always will be Article V. It is a document that is *meant* to be updated in order to repair, maintain, and upgrade our governing institutions, and it is not surprising that we find the aging and poorly maintained mechanisms of the political process have started to fail over the past half century or so.
NO. STOP. Court expansion, especially a proposal to expand the court and *do nothing else*, is a *terrible* idea! At best, we'd be slapping a bandaid on a broken leg. If Democrats expand the court to get more seats, that just encourages everyone to treat the court as a partisan institution that is to be tilted in either direction whenever one party takes control of enough of the rest of the government to make it happen. All it does is give Republicans a free pass to do exactly the same thing the next time they hold power, and then we're back where we started.
There are three fundamental things that are needed for the Court to function as a healthy part of our democratic system:
1) Term limits, with senior status to allow coverage in the event of recusal or vacancy, and regular rotation of the Chief Justice position. The goal of this suite of reforms would be to cut down on the incentives to "steal" seats in the first place by putting in place well-defined caps on the value of each seat and ensuring that attempting to game the system cannot, in and of itself, cripple the Court. It also eliminates the "duty to sit" justification that Alito cowers behind in his refusal to recuse.
2) An active Congress capable of responding to court rulings - when the Court gets things wrong, or says that the political branches have failed to set up their policies correctly, those political branches need to actually respond to what happens. *Shelby County* left an obvious gap through which the preclearance requirement could be restored: replace the provisions targeting jurisdictions based on their 1965 characteristics with a formula that uses some general formula for detecting voter discrimination, and Roberts' entire position collapses. But for the past decade, Congress has declined to step through that gap. Qualified immunity is an entirely invented doctrine of the Court that Congress can erase at any time it chooses, but it continues to degrade our civil rights to this day.
3) Regular amendments to the Constitution as new issues emerge. The process is difficult and we are out of the habit, but it is worth remembering, especially in this period of founder-worship we find ourselves in, that the most important part of the Constitution always has been and always will be Article V. It is a document that is *meant* to be updated in order to repair, maintain, and upgrade our governing institutions, and it is not surprising that we find the aging and poorly maintained mechanisms of the political process have started to fail over the past half century or so.