I a country of 330 million? mmm...Originally Posted by dodint
I a country of 330 million? mmm...
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Yes.
To address it empirically, there are only 870 authorized Article III judges, 9 of which are already on the SCOTUS. So 861 people out of 330,000,000 that can reasonably demonstrate that they have the requisite resume to at least be considered for nomination to the court. Say for a moment, for illustrative purposes, you could rank them in order: 1 through 861. You would promote number 1 every year and replace the most senior SCOTUS justice. When viewed in that best case scenario you see that we've devised a system of taking the best and brightest legal minds in the country and discarding them arbitrarily on an annual basis.
More subjectively, when there is a SCOTUS seat open and you analyze who might legitimately be able to fill that seat the lists are short, typically single digits. The proposed system burns through that list in less than a decade. Then what?
I have a hard time supporting that, but I'm open to suggestions. My biggest practical opposition to it can be summed up pretty easily through a hypothetical: Say Trump (or any president) is reelected and serves the full 8 years. That's 8/9 SCOTUS justices chosen by one executive administration. Ouch.
Does legislation not allow from people outside the judiciary to be 'drafted', like say, legal scholars?
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From the wikipedia link I posted earlier - a quote from former Chief Justice William Rehnquist:
"President Roosevelt lost the Court-packing battle, but he won the war for control of the Supreme Court ... not by any novel legislation, but by serving in office for more than twelve years, and appointing eight of the nine Justices of the Court."
I believe the president can appoint anyone he wishes, but he or she must be confirmed by the Senate. I assume most people without a judicial record would have a difficult confirmation process - even more difficult than it has become in recent decades.
I've heard or read speculation that Barack Obama might be appointed to the court by Hillary Clinton, if elected, or some future Democratic president. The link goes to the Law Career portion of his wikipedia page. Most people here already know about that, I'm sure.
This learned group probably already knows this too, but if not, here's some trivia (and precedent): William Taft was president of the United States from 1909 - 1913 and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1921 - 1930.
Yes, anyone can be appointed. I think if someone is advocating for appointing non-jurists to SCOTUS they either are not being serious or do not have an understanding of the breadth of legal issues the courts actually rule on. Most of the cases are lopsided decisions about legal minutia. It's the 5-4 splits on sexy social issues that get folks riled up about the makeup of the court.
Competency matters. Have a look at a hearing in 2017 when Trump tried to put a completely inexperienced non-litigator into a federal judgeship:
https://twitter.com/SenWhitehouse/st...84131757838337
Legal scholars or other non-judges probably just won't have any 'track record' to show their appointees... if you can't tell which way they lean politically, you probably won't nominate or confirm such person?
Anyway, personally, if I have my way, I'd ask all 861 of them to be 'jurors'. Whenever you can't get ALL SCOTUS to agree on something... meaning such issue just isn't clear cut due to political or whatever reasons, or this issue is just way too opened for interpretation based on the constitution, then we'll let all 861 of them vote on this hot issue! If there's a tie after counting all 870 votes, then chief justice can be the tie breaker.
This method should be much fairer and unless another dumbass president could appoint all 9 conservative judges, we should no longer have to fear which president appoints who to the court.
Maybe asking all 9 to agree is too much... perhaps we can set the limit to no more than 2 dissenting SCOTUS... when more than 2 dissented on certain 'gray' issue, then we activate supreme jury duty from all 861 judges!
Last edited by Crazed_Insanity; July 12th, 2019 at 12:00 PM.
Yeah I can see why old private counselors would want in.
If you're good enough to be minutia-ous you'd be making a killing representing. And then, when you're old and wrinkled and money doesn't get your thrill on, you go for that challenge.
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If you chose money while your young, it kinda proves that you’re not really all that passionate about true justice, right?
Can one really trust a rich old lawyer to all of a sudden care about justice at the Supreme Court level when old enough to retire? It’d probably won’t end well just like a billionaire trying to run for president...
Also, it’s a real good slap of the faces to those other 861 judges...
Other end is that those eight years can't nominate any.
Minority nomination for double POTUS with nine judges is one every other year.
That's 18 years in charge for one, quite a long time for a failure.
Even changing a trend is pretty slow.
Obviously I see it so that replacing a bad one is more important that keeping a good one.
If Trump gets a second term Ginsburg is a guardian of many things, maybe even the whole court.
Yeah, that kind of illustrates my point though. If your original plan had been in place when RBG was sworn in she would have been rotated out by 2003.
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