Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/21/hes-their-man.html
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There is nothing in the Constitution mandating that the Supreme Court have nine members, and a simple act of Congress could increase that number to 11, or 15, or even more.
well i sure learned something new today.
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Trmp is Grover Norquist’s dream of a dumb President who is simply the hand that signs legislation and executive orders as it whittles down the Federal government so that it can be drowned in the bathtub. Witness how many departments have acting administrators and how many under-secretary jobs have never and will never be filled before 2020.
Trmp is the wet dream of the 1950s John Birch Society.
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Not only has Trump been rather unproductive, most everything he has accomplished can be undone by the next President.
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This is a good point i hadn’t thought of. Republicans have been promising, and failing, to outlaw abortion for almost fifty years. Even when they held all three branches, they failed. It’s almost as if… that’s not really their #1 priority. Weird, I know.
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If they finally succeeded, though, the GOP elites would simply secretly send their daughters to private Swiss clinics for discrete ‘treatment’. Gotta keep up appearances.
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It depends on what you mean by “priority.”
- A platform/“dog whistle” to garner votes, even though it has no hopes of surviving.
- If they were successful, the other side would have to merely poison the legislation to include penalizing elites as they return from their out of country operations.
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Its a cheap shot and a power move - but so head and shoulders above McConnells sleazy deny Obama his appointment that I am all for it. I say add 4 more liberal justices and pound away at Kavanaugh till he resigns, and pursue gorsuch over McConnells wrong doing in his appointment. And invalidate all trumps other appointments based on his criminality. Lets secure 50yrs of liberal courts.
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not to mention how he slowed obama judicial appointments to an unprecedented standstill to pack the courts when a republic president swung into power.
( well, either that or mcconell’s just a racist. it’s never been clear to me whether it was skin color or party which was his primary motivator. unless they knew something we didnt, there was no way to know which party would win following obama. )
heck, i’d be happy with some moderates. any really. 
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And likewise everything accomplished by the next president, shall hereby be undone by the following president. And likewise their actions shall be undone by those who come after, and so shall it be until the end of time.
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We don’t need “liberal” courts. We need progressive laws and courts that rule in accordance with the law. In theory it shouldn’t matter what a judge’s personal political leanings are; that’s why there have been so many landmark civil rights cases that sided against conservatives even when a majority of SCOTUS judges were appointed by conservative Presidents.
Unfortunately the Federalist Society has spent the last couple of decades waging a largely successful campaign to change how judges are appointed, prioritizing rigid political ideology over all other qualifications.
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If we pack the court, we better hope we never get a GOP president again because they’ll do the exact same thing, but more aggressively.
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Ironcially the judicial philosophy you just described would be described in law articles as “conservative”. Justices who write their own law and ignore precedent are not in any way shape or form “conservative”
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Well, it’s ignoring certain “norms.” But the Republicans have made throwing norms out the window into their modus operandi, with everyone expecting the Democrats to continue playing by all the unwritten rules out of “decorum.”
Under normal circumstances, there are plenty of things that presidents do that the next one, even when differing ideologically, don’t want to undo (or they want to, but the chaos caused wouldn’t be politically worth it). Trump undoes Obama’s accomplishments reflexively, and has no qualms about creating chaos. There are a couple things that Trump undid and then wanted to do again…
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The more seats on the court, the less impact the partisanship of any single judge has. The more the merrier.
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True, but it’s worth considering the lasting damage Trump and his enablers are doing to the bureaucracy itself. While Trump’s executive orders can and will be rescinded by the next Democrat elected president, the many positions left unfilled by the this administration and their disregard for the importance of continuity and pass down will have a lasting impact on the effectiveness of the federal government. Michael Lewis’ excellent (and disturbing) book The Fifth Risk (thanks @navarro) does a good job framing the problem and its likely consequences.
spelling, geez
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“Originalism” aka “the law is whatever I say it is, fuck any kind of precedent”
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He hasn’t managed to repeal the ACA, and not for want of trying. I think there’s a number of reasons, and we need to learn from them and repeat our success.
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Fear of “abortion” is a powerful weapon to keep evangelicals and catholics voting Republican. If they actually outlawed it, they woud effectivey neutralize one of their most powerful tools. The Party’s strategy is to never succeed. Once people aren’t angry or afraid, they would stop voting Republican. The Party therefore has to keep the fear alive in order to survive.
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Untrue. Judges tend to vote a certain way. It’ll just start a destabilizing back and forth of court packing. There’s already not a ton of federal judges, the end result will be inexperiences, unqualified applicants being advanced to the bench voting along partisan lines.
