You can propose justices having definite (e.g. 10 year) terms without going all the way to term limits. I think the Federal Reserve Board of Governors is an example of a successful balance of very long but definite terms to protect against political interference.
As has been mentioned, term limits for legislators don’t work out nearly as well as they are emotionally satisfying.
I do however see the point in term limits for the executive as a defense against tyranny. Typically when a dictator takes over, it’s out of an executive position not a legislative one.
Yeah, non-lifetime terms and "term limits" are different things. The former seems great, the latter less so
My general problem with term limits is you're not really doing anything about a lot of the perverse incentives that cause problems in the first place, you're just changing the lizard person experiencing them.
My general problem with term limits is you're not really doing anything about a lot of the perverse incentives that cause problems in the first place, you're just changing the lizard person experiencing them.
There's a thread of thought in "good government" activists that the problem with government is "power corrupts", which gets the arrow of causality backwards.
My general problem with term limits is you're not really doing anything about a lot of the perverse incentives that cause problems in the first place, you're just changing the lizard person experiencing them.
There's a thread of thought in "good government" activists that the problem with government is "power corrupts", which gets the arrow of causality backwards.
Could you elaborate on this? Is the reverse "corruption empowers"?
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
My general problem with term limits is you're not really doing anything about a lot of the perverse incentives that cause problems in the first place, you're just changing the lizard person experiencing them.
There's a thread of thought in "good government" activists that the problem with government is "power corrupts", which gets the arrow of causality backwards.
Could you elaborate on this? Is the reverse "corruption empowers"?
I mean those that are corrupt are going to have an easier time getting power.
My general problem with term limits is you're not really doing anything about a lot of the perverse incentives that cause problems in the first place, you're just changing the lizard person experiencing them.
There's a thread of thought in "good government" activists that the problem with government is "power corrupts", which gets the arrow of causality backwards.
The incentives Im talking about arent nebulous notions of power corrupting in and of itself, though I do believe it. Im talking about financial interests that hold sway over politicians for the usual reason. Term limits don't stop you from doing what your donors want.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
edited October 2021
I mean, it's both. Being very powerful causes brain damage to the parts of the brain that handle empathy (if you don't have anyone pushing back on your BS, you start losing that skill, just like any other you don't use), so it does corrupt, but power also very much attracts the already corrupt, in the same way that youth ministries and pee-wee coaching attracts pedophiles.
Power is just dangerous like that. Also how it accumulates at the top to become a bigger prize for the worst of humanity.
My general problem with term limits is you're not really doing anything about a lot of the perverse incentives that cause problems in the first place, you're just changing the lizard person experiencing them.
There's a thread of thought in "good government" activists that the problem with government is "power corrupts", which gets the arrow of causality backwards.
Could you elaborate on this? Is the reverse "corruption empowers"?
Yes.
The easiest and least controversial way to examine this is earmarks. This allows a congressperson to pay another congressperson for policy. The payment coming in pork given specifically to their district that they can go back home to and proclaim loudly that they delivered. Without such payments the only negotiating point is on policy itself and policy itself is a LOT harder to negotiate on. If you're unwilling to exist within the system of earmarks (before earmarks) you're quickly shuffled off because you don't get anything to show for your work.
Similar things exist all over more or less any organization for similar reasons. A small trade can allow a larger and more important thing to go through. But of course this has negative applications as well. Because you need money in order to win campaigns and so trading policy for the money required to win campaigns makes perfect sense.
Thus there is both a sense that power corrupts but also that, if you're unwilling to be corrupted its very hard to get anywhere in the system. If you cannot make the small trades to get things done you won't make it to the position where you're subjected to the perverse incentives that produce the trades to get bad things done.
Unfortunately, the public (myself included) was sold on the idea that all of the above trading of favors, "pork", etc was inherently corrupt, and so in the interest of cleaning up said corruption, rules were made to eliminate it. This left everyone to retreat to and entrench themselves around policy, per above, and we've seen how well that's worked - especially when one party has as one of their major policies, "the other party doesn't get to enact any of theirs". (Also tax cuts, racism, etc.)
This goes hand in hand with the notion that all politics is inherently corrupt, and that we can (and should) replace it with some system where everyone just sees and agrees on what is self-evidently best for everyone, and makes that happen. I hope I have conveyed how absurdly naive and impractical that idea actually is.
In the abstract, pork is indeed a corrupt mechanism, but it functioned within the broadly corrupt system and culture. Like how we have to use lawsuits to pursue some semblence of justice.
Pork is not a result of a corrupt system, it's the result of a system where individual representatives are both more independent of their own party and have the power to stall the party-in-charge's agenda. Once you have ideologically coherent parties there's not really any reason for someone who disagrees with that ideology to vote for your agenda. And if they can't forced by the party system, they must be bribed.
Its not even bad to give the losers in a policy discussion a concession. I don't care if people in Tennessee get a bridge and healthcare. It makes them feel better about the loss in policy (which is good because this reduces partisan resentment at losing policy issues) AND then they have healthcare!
Every time I see this kind of discussion about how politics actually function, the real, behind-the-scenes mechanics of it all, the more I am convinced that my political education was conceived purely as a means to confuse and frustrate understanding.
We all know the School House Rock song. We all know how it goes through the barest outline set out in the US Constitution. Yet it doesn't even begin to touch on how the process actually works. The committees and sub-committees. The hearings. The markups. The control the various party leaders have in promoting or hindering legislation from happening.
And I feel like everyone wants it to work better, to have better more compassionate people installed to make these kinds of decisions. However, the reality of the process, the selection process for your representatives go through, none of that is talked about in the school books I was taught with. None of it.
Which makes talking about it with people who have never educated themselves a serious drag because all they know is the idealized version, if that. The rest is likely an artifact of loose sources from television and news reports.
All opinions are my own and in no way reflect that of my employer.
My general problem with term limits is you're not really doing anything about a lot of the perverse incentives that cause problems in the first place, you're just changing the lizard person experiencing them.
There's a thread of thought in "good government" activists that the problem with government is "power corrupts", which gets the arrow of causality backwards.
Could you elaborate on this? Is the reverse "corruption empowers"?
"Power corrupts" is the idea that good people become corrupted by contact with power. And while it is absolutely true, it is not the corrupting influence of power that is the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is that the Corrupted Seek Power. For every good person who loses touch with their fellow man, there's scores of assholes who never had any empathy in the first place. And they all seek power at a greater rate than the non-corrupted. As Terry Pratchett said, "It isn't that you've got the wrong type of government. That's obvious. The real problem is you've got the wrong kind of people."
I don't think that Republicans and Blue Dogs had any idea that the war they waged on earmarks would have the effect it did
Largely because almost all of them either got primaried or retired rather than deal with the batshit burn-it-all-downers who won those primaries.
But it turns out when you take away the grease that allows the machine to run the machine stops fucking running, you idiots.
And I'll fully admit I was all in on it calling a lot of those pet projects a waste of money but in retrospect?
Fuck it
If this is the result of us not wasting some money on some dumb things then by all means can we please go back to spending some money on dumb things.
The people waging war on earmarks either 1) knew exactly what their removal would do or 2) didn't care, because they were ideologically opposed to the idea of government actually, you know, governing. (Read the CREW Wastebook sometime - it becomes very apparent that they believe "the government that rules least rules best.")
I don't think that Republicans and Blue Dogs had any idea that the war they waged on earmarks would have the effect it did
Largely because almost all of them either got primaried or retired rather than deal with the batshit burn-it-all-downers who won those primaries.
But it turns out when you take away the grease that allows the machine to run the machine stops fucking running, you idiots.
And I'll fully admit I was all in on it calling a lot of those pet projects a waste of money but in retrospect?
Fuck it
If this is the result of us not wasting some money on some dumb things then by all means can we please go back to spending some money on dumb things.
The people waging war on earmarks either 1) knew exactly what their removal would do or 2) didn't care, because they were ideologically opposed to the idea of government actually, you know, governing. (Read the CREW Wastebook sometime - it becomes very apparent that they believe "the government that rules least rules best.")
Yeah, in looking back on where the anti-earmarks rhetoric originated from shows it was always part of the "starve the beast" strategy.
All opinions are my own and in no way reflect that of my employer.
We should probably move this to the Congress thread, though, as aside from the "does power corrupt, or do the corrupt seek power?" question, I don't think it's really germane to the SCOTUS.
I find it surprising and interesting that everyone here agrees that lifetime, irreversible, unelected appointments to something as powerful as the SCOTUS is bad. Which goes to show just how bad it is.
I find it surprising and interesting that everyone here agrees that lifetime, irreversible, unelected appointments to something as powerful as the SCOTUS is bad. Which goes to show just how bad it is.
It's not irreversible you can impeach them with a majority vote in the House and remove them with a two-thirds vote in the Senate. CHECKS AND BALANCES! :rotate:
Well yea. I mean like how for elected positions you have to keep running when your term is up. Once a SCOTUS justice is appointed they can only be removed by impeachment they can’t be removed. My wording was poor because it’s possible to have appointed positions with term limits.
I just don’t like how so much of our rights hinges on “when will this decrepit human being die”. I liked RBG but I did not like how every bit of news on her health gave me a heart attack.
The FCC is an example of a board with term limited appointments. I think the terms they can serve are unlimited, but when their current term ends, they don't get to get serving unless they get re-nominated. You could do something similar with the courts and actually limit judges to only getting one term on SCOTUS. Kills the BS we have right now where someone old fucker puts their interests ahead of the nation and then dies at the worst possible time for the nation. Also gets rid of some of the illusion about the court being impartial.
The FCC is an example of a board with term limited appointments. I think the terms they can serve are unlimited, but when their current term ends, they don't get to get serving unless they get re-nominated. You could do something similar with the courts and actually limit judges to only getting one term on SCOTUS. Kills the BS we have right now where someone old fucker puts their interests ahead of the nation and then dies at the worst possible time for the nation. Also gets rid of some of the illusion about the court being impartial.
Yeah, the fact that whatsisface retired so that Trump would nominate Kavanaugh is enough evidence that the whole process is political and partial.
I mean, there's no easy solution (because at some point someone has to select them, and someone probably has to confirm their fitness for the role, and both points are corruptible.
If I were going to design the SCOTUS from the ground up, I'd probably do something like this.
Each circuit (after splitting / rebalancing circuits) nominates some fairly small number of judges each year (or for a fixed multi-year term) through some sort of internal election process. Judges are maybe permitted to serve multiple but non-consecutive terms as a Justice throughout their careers.
When a case that would go to SCOTUS today comes up, a panel from the pool of maybe 20-30 judges are appointed either at random or from some process (possibly round-robin, maybe some sort of nomination / voting process within the pool?) to determine if the case should be granted cert, and if so rule on the case. You might have a system where the judges granting cert are a different panel than ones hearing the cases, or one panel only grants cert while another panel or group of panels actually hear the case.
There are still of course some problems with the system and you would likely have factions form both in the circuits and at the SCOTUS level, but by having shorter terms and more judges / justices it seems like it would dilute the partisan impact of any one particular judge or philosophy.
Maybe I'm wrong and this would just end up being a shitshow with entrenched and unaccountable interests, but it doesn't seem like it would be WORSE.
If I were going to design the SCOTUS from the ground up, I'd probably do something like this.
Each circuit (after splitting / rebalancing circuits) nominates some fairly small number of judges each year (or for a fixed multi-year term) through some sort of internal election process. Judges are maybe permitted to serve multiple but non-consecutive terms as a Justice throughout their careers.
When a case that would go to SCOTUS today comes up, a panel from the pool of maybe 20-30 judges are appointed either at random or from some process (possibly round-robin, maybe some sort of nomination / voting process within the pool?) to determine if the case should be granted cert, and if so rule on the case. You might have a system where the judges granting cert are a different panel than ones hearing the cases, or one panel only grants cert while another panel or group of panels actually hear the case.
There are still of course some problems with the system and you would likely have factions form both in the circuits and at the SCOTUS level, but by having shorter terms and more judges / justices it seems like it would dilute the partisan impact of any one particular judge or philosophy.
Maybe I'm wrong and this would just end up being a shitshow with entrenched and unaccountable interests, but it doesn't seem like it would be WORSE.
That’s the end goal. Something like your idea is appealing, but I’m very apprehensive about leaving the SCOTUS makeup to be decided by the courts themselves. Balance of powers is not an inherently bad idea.
If I were going to design the SCOTUS from the ground up, I'd probably do something like this.
Each circuit (after splitting / rebalancing circuits) nominates some fairly small number of judges each year (or for a fixed multi-year term) through some sort of internal election process. Judges are maybe permitted to serve multiple but non-consecutive terms as a Justice throughout their careers.
When a case that would go to SCOTUS today comes up, a panel from the pool of maybe 20-30 judges are appointed either at random or from some process (possibly round-robin, maybe some sort of nomination / voting process within the pool?) to determine if the case should be granted cert, and if so rule on the case. You might have a system where the judges granting cert are a different panel than ones hearing the cases, or one panel only grants cert while another panel or group of panels actually hear the case.
There are still of course some problems with the system and you would likely have factions form both in the circuits and at the SCOTUS level, but by having shorter terms and more judges / justices it seems like it would dilute the partisan impact of any one particular judge or philosophy.
Maybe I'm wrong and this would just end up being a shitshow with entrenched and unaccountable interests, but it doesn't seem like it would be WORSE.
That’s the end goal. Something like your idea is appealing, but I’m very apprehensive about leaving the SCOTUS makeup to be decided by the courts themselves. Balance of powers is not an inherently bad idea.
Ultimately every revision or idea of reform in government relies on good faith actors. Which if we had them, we wouldn't need reform.
So assuming the worst any system that lets a federal court be 'judge shopped' is probably a bad idea. You'd get Texas anti-choice lawmakers just fishing for a makeup of justices that would let their crazy happen and it would be like watching someone savescum to beat RNG.
If I were going to design the SCOTUS from the ground up, I'd probably do something like this.
Each circuit (after splitting / rebalancing circuits) nominates some fairly small number of judges each year (or for a fixed multi-year term) through some sort of internal election process. Judges are maybe permitted to serve multiple but non-consecutive terms as a Justice throughout their careers.
When a case that would go to SCOTUS today comes up, a panel from the pool of maybe 20-30 judges are appointed either at random or from some process (possibly round-robin, maybe some sort of nomination / voting process within the pool?) to determine if the case should be granted cert, and if so rule on the case. You might have a system where the judges granting cert are a different panel than ones hearing the cases, or one panel only grants cert while another panel or group of panels actually hear the case.
There are still of course some problems with the system and you would likely have factions form both in the circuits and at the SCOTUS level, but by having shorter terms and more judges / justices it seems like it would dilute the partisan impact of any one particular judge or philosophy.
Maybe I'm wrong and this would just end up being a shitshow with entrenched and unaccountable interests, but it doesn't seem like it would be WORSE.
That’s the end goal. Something like your idea is appealing, but I’m very apprehensive about leaving the SCOTUS makeup to be decided by the courts themselves. Balance of powers is not an inherently bad idea.
Ultimately every revision or idea of reform in government relies on good faith actors. Which if we had them, we wouldn't need reform.
So assuming the worst any system that lets a federal court be 'judge shopped' is probably a bad idea. You'd get Texas anti-choice lawmakers just fishing for a makeup of justices that would let their crazy happen and it would be like watching someone savescum to beat RNG.
Easy. Just hide the bench. Have the justices appear as shadows on canvas. No way that backfires, yes?
In seriousness, “good faith” is ultimately how civilization has always worked. Or at least rational self interest. Doesn’t mean that we can’t make certain things better. There is not and never will be a perfect SCOTUS, but I’m hopeful we can have better than now.
To your specific criticism, that seems plausible to me. I don’t know how to fix it, IANAL. It sounds less bad than the status quo, at least.
I find it surprising and interesting that everyone here agrees that lifetime, irreversible, unelected appointments to something as powerful as the SCOTUS is bad. Which goes to show just how bad it is.
I don’t agree! Lifetime appointments are good, election for judges are a nightmare we should never entertain at any level, and SCOTUS appointments are only irreversible because Congress is broken.
I think the system as built is fine and, until McConnell broke appointments & enabled Trump, the people in the chairs were mostly fine, most of the time.
I find it surprising and interesting that everyone here agrees that lifetime, irreversible, unelected appointments to something as powerful as the SCOTUS is bad. Which goes to show just how bad it is.
I don’t agree! Lifetime appointments are good, election for judges are a nightmare we should never entertain at any level, and SCOTUS appointments are only irreversible because Congress is broken.
I think the system as built is fine and, until McConnell broke appointments & enabled Trump, the people in the chairs were mostly fine, most of the time.
They really weren't. The vast majority of SCOTUS's history has been enabling the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.
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Historically Dred Scotts have been a lot more common than BrownvBoard's, unfortunately.
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I find it surprising and interesting that everyone here agrees that lifetime, irreversible, unelected appointments to something as powerful as the SCOTUS is bad. Which goes to show just how bad it is.
I don’t agree! Lifetime appointments are good, election for judges are a nightmare we should never entertain at any level, and SCOTUS appointments are only irreversible because Congress is broken.
I think the system as built is fine and, until McConnell broke appointments & enabled Trump, the people in the chairs were mostly fine, most of the time.
Lifetime appointments and elections are not the only two options.
Dunno, I think that an easier reach is a mandatory retirement age. Same with Congress, anything that stops Boomers from having power until people can jank if off their cooling corpses is a bonus. And it helps to make the entire "Presidential elections matter for SCOTUS" more clear.
I find it surprising and interesting that everyone here agrees that lifetime, irreversible, unelected appointments to something as powerful as the SCOTUS is bad. Which goes to show just how bad it is.
I don’t agree! Lifetime appointments are good, election for judges are a nightmare we should never entertain at any level, and SCOTUS appointments are only irreversible because Congress is broken.
I think the system as built is fine and, until McConnell broke appointments & enabled Trump, the people in the chairs were mostly fine, most of the time.
No federal officer higher than a bench judge has ever been removed by impeachment. If congress is broken its always been broken. There are certainly in nearly 250 years plenty of federal officials that have warranted removal but were not going to voluntarily resign, and impeachments have been attempted many times, but never once has it actually been successful when the accused didn’t essentially plead guilty/no contest.
Federal officials above a rank where they aren’t disposable and easily replaced are essentially unremovable, and within the context of that lifetime appointments are terrible.
I find it surprising and interesting that everyone here agrees that lifetime, irreversible, unelected appointments to something as powerful as the SCOTUS is bad. Which goes to show just how bad it is.
I don’t agree! Lifetime appointments are good, election for judges are a nightmare we should never entertain at any level, and SCOTUS appointments are only irreversible because Congress is broken.
I think the system as built is fine and, until McConnell broke appointments & enabled Trump, the people in the chairs were mostly fine, most of the time.
No federal officer higher than a bench judge has ever been removed by impeachment. If congress is broken its always been broken. There are certainly in nearly 250 years plenty of federal officials that have warranted removal but were not going to voluntarily resign, and impeachments have been attempted many times, but never once has it actually been successful when the accused didn’t essentially plead guilty/no contest.
Federal officials above a rank where they aren’t disposable and easily replaced are essentially unremovable, and within the context of that lifetime appointments are terrible.
So, fix impeachment! "We've given up on the legislative, so we need to start fucking with the judicial" is not something I feel like is very productive.
Fix apportionment, bring back earmarks (holy fuck I cannot believe I said that) - unfuck Congress and SCOTUS is automatically less relevant by virtue of being co-equal again.
I'd be fine if each session were done by picking two judges from each circuit. With one half chosen by an internal vote in each circuit system of current sitting judges and vetted by the BAR association for conduct. One half chosen by the executive with congressional consent - without the option of just not acknowledging the nomination (looking at you fucking McConnell). With no consecutive terms but no limits. Each judge would be prohibited from hearing a case they had any involvement in, not this 'optional' recusal nonsense.
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Yeah, non-lifetime terms and "term limits" are different things. The former seems great, the latter less so
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There's a thread of thought in "good government" activists that the problem with government is "power corrupts", which gets the arrow of causality backwards.
The incentives Im talking about arent nebulous notions of power corrupting in and of itself, though I do believe it. Im talking about financial interests that hold sway over politicians for the usual reason. Term limits don't stop you from doing what your donors want.
Power is just dangerous like that. Also how it accumulates at the top to become a bigger prize for the worst of humanity.
Yes.
The easiest and least controversial way to examine this is earmarks. This allows a congressperson to pay another congressperson for policy. The payment coming in pork given specifically to their district that they can go back home to and proclaim loudly that they delivered. Without such payments the only negotiating point is on policy itself and policy itself is a LOT harder to negotiate on. If you're unwilling to exist within the system of earmarks (before earmarks) you're quickly shuffled off because you don't get anything to show for your work.
Similar things exist all over more or less any organization for similar reasons. A small trade can allow a larger and more important thing to go through. But of course this has negative applications as well. Because you need money in order to win campaigns and so trading policy for the money required to win campaigns makes perfect sense.
Thus there is both a sense that power corrupts but also that, if you're unwilling to be corrupted its very hard to get anywhere in the system. If you cannot make the small trades to get things done you won't make it to the position where you're subjected to the perverse incentives that produce the trades to get bad things done.
This goes hand in hand with the notion that all politics is inherently corrupt, and that we can (and should) replace it with some system where everyone just sees and agrees on what is self-evidently best for everyone, and makes that happen. I hope I have conveyed how absurdly naive and impractical that idea actually is.
We all know the School House Rock song. We all know how it goes through the barest outline set out in the US Constitution. Yet it doesn't even begin to touch on how the process actually works. The committees and sub-committees. The hearings. The markups. The control the various party leaders have in promoting or hindering legislation from happening.
And I feel like everyone wants it to work better, to have better more compassionate people installed to make these kinds of decisions. However, the reality of the process, the selection process for your representatives go through, none of that is talked about in the school books I was taught with. None of it.
Which makes talking about it with people who have never educated themselves a serious drag because all they know is the idealized version, if that. The rest is likely an artifact of loose sources from television and news reports.
Largely because almost all of them either got primaried or retired rather than deal with the batshit burn-it-all-downers who won those primaries.
But it turns out when you take away the grease that allows the machine to run the machine stops fucking running, you idiots.
And I'll fully admit I was all in on it calling a lot of those pet projects a waste of money but in retrospect?
Fuck it
If this is the result of us not wasting some money on some dumb things then by all means can we please go back to spending some money on dumb things.
"Power corrupts" is the idea that good people become corrupted by contact with power. And while it is absolutely true, it is not the corrupting influence of power that is the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is that the Corrupted Seek Power. For every good person who loses touch with their fellow man, there's scores of assholes who never had any empathy in the first place. And they all seek power at a greater rate than the non-corrupted. As Terry Pratchett said, "It isn't that you've got the wrong type of government. That's obvious. The real problem is you've got the wrong kind of people."
The people waging war on earmarks either 1) knew exactly what their removal would do or 2) didn't care, because they were ideologically opposed to the idea of government actually, you know, governing. (Read the CREW Wastebook sometime - it becomes very apparent that they believe "the government that rules least rules best.")
Yeah, in looking back on where the anti-earmarks rhetoric originated from shows it was always part of the "starve the beast" strategy.
It's not irreversible you can impeach them with a majority vote in the House and remove them with a two-thirds vote in the Senate. CHECKS AND BALANCES! :rotate:
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Well yea. I mean like how for elected positions you have to keep running when your term is up. Once a SCOTUS justice is appointed they can only be removed by impeachment they can’t be removed. My wording was poor because it’s possible to have appointed positions with term limits.
I just don’t like how so much of our rights hinges on “when will this decrepit human being die”. I liked RBG but I did not like how every bit of news on her health gave me a heart attack.
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Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Yeah, the fact that whatsisface retired so that Trump would nominate Kavanaugh is enough evidence that the whole process is political and partial.
I mean, there's no easy solution (because at some point someone has to select them, and someone probably has to confirm their fitness for the role, and both points are corruptible.
Each circuit (after splitting / rebalancing circuits) nominates some fairly small number of judges each year (or for a fixed multi-year term) through some sort of internal election process. Judges are maybe permitted to serve multiple but non-consecutive terms as a Justice throughout their careers.
When a case that would go to SCOTUS today comes up, a panel from the pool of maybe 20-30 judges are appointed either at random or from some process (possibly round-robin, maybe some sort of nomination / voting process within the pool?) to determine if the case should be granted cert, and if so rule on the case. You might have a system where the judges granting cert are a different panel than ones hearing the cases, or one panel only grants cert while another panel or group of panels actually hear the case.
There are still of course some problems with the system and you would likely have factions form both in the circuits and at the SCOTUS level, but by having shorter terms and more judges / justices it seems like it would dilute the partisan impact of any one particular judge or philosophy.
Maybe I'm wrong and this would just end up being a shitshow with entrenched and unaccountable interests, but it doesn't seem like it would be WORSE.
That’s the end goal. Something like your idea is appealing, but I’m very apprehensive about leaving the SCOTUS makeup to be decided by the courts themselves. Balance of powers is not an inherently bad idea.
Ultimately every revision or idea of reform in government relies on good faith actors. Which if we had them, we wouldn't need reform.
So assuming the worst any system that lets a federal court be 'judge shopped' is probably a bad idea. You'd get Texas anti-choice lawmakers just fishing for a makeup of justices that would let their crazy happen and it would be like watching someone savescum to beat RNG.
Easy. Just hide the bench. Have the justices appear as shadows on canvas. No way that backfires, yes?
In seriousness, “good faith” is ultimately how civilization has always worked. Or at least rational self interest. Doesn’t mean that we can’t make certain things better. There is not and never will be a perfect SCOTUS, but I’m hopeful we can have better than now.
To your specific criticism, that seems plausible to me. I don’t know how to fix it, IANAL. It sounds less bad than the status quo, at least.
But you can make it so individual bad faith actors have a harder time messing things up.
I don’t agree! Lifetime appointments are good, election for judges are a nightmare we should never entertain at any level, and SCOTUS appointments are only irreversible because Congress is broken.
I think the system as built is fine and, until McConnell broke appointments & enabled Trump, the people in the chairs were mostly fine, most of the time.
They really weren't. The vast majority of SCOTUS's history has been enabling the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.
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Lifetime appointments and elections are not the only two options.
No federal officer higher than a bench judge has ever been removed by impeachment. If congress is broken its always been broken. There are certainly in nearly 250 years plenty of federal officials that have warranted removal but were not going to voluntarily resign, and impeachments have been attempted many times, but never once has it actually been successful when the accused didn’t essentially plead guilty/no contest.
Federal officials above a rank where they aren’t disposable and easily replaced are essentially unremovable, and within the context of that lifetime appointments are terrible.
So, fix impeachment! "We've given up on the legislative, so we need to start fucking with the judicial" is not something I feel like is very productive.
Fix apportionment, bring back earmarks (holy fuck I cannot believe I said that) - unfuck Congress and SCOTUS is automatically less relevant by virtue of being co-equal again.
Thing is it isn’t nearly as big of a problem for legislative or executive branch officials that can just be voted out or sacked by the president.