That said, the majority determines the rules and could have changed them to make way for packing the court if not for the above-mentioned conservative Dems standing in the way.
I still think they should have done whatever it took to get Mansema in line to pack the court and pass the voting rights acts. It would have been worth building a canal to the Capitol off the Potomac for Joe to park his houseboat and building Simema a penthouse apartment on top of the rotunda to get those existential bills passed.
The federal judiciary doesn’t have them because the Constitution specifies they have lifetime appointments. It would require a Constitutional amendment to apply term limits to federal judges. It might be a good idea but would be virtually impossible to implement.
One suggestion I’ve seen is that since Article III doesn’t address the Supreme Court explicitly, Congress could apply a term limit to the SC after which the judge would be demoted back to a regular federal judge.
It’s not just Sinema and Manchin that opposed getting rid of the filibuster. There are a lot of Senators who oppose that. Again, they’re buying into this notion of Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and it’s just not reality, but it’s a common view. Not just in the Senate, either. My mother thought that way. I managed to change her mind by getting her to read Federalist Paper #22. Maybe we could email a copy to all the Senate Dems.
