And that thread never gets put in timeout. The thread does take timeouts for a beer though.
I don't know...things are already looking bleak, would things getting worse be all that bad compared to the reward of a 6th conservative justice?
My kids are still young and there are plenty of times the are happy to accept punishment for actions and feel they got the good end of the deal.
Ha! Genius!!
It could get very interesting. Pelosi said that nothing is off the table including trying to impeach Bill Barr to occupy the Senate. I think that would be a really bad move by Pelosi. That would galvanize the base a make Pelosi into a Hillary like target for Trump to gather the same support he got in 2016.
The SCOTUS, like all of politics, become politicized to the point that it’s legitimacy may be questioned by large segments of the public. Imo the issue is lifetime appointments. The stakes for each new appointment have become paramount to the point that presidents look for the youngest candidates who can serve the longest, justices serve until death and the senate grills appointments over being immature, drunk and handsy in HS. I know the court has been expanded in the past - what is the process?
If anyone asked I would propose a 17 member court serving 16-year terms with a justice rotating off and a new justice appointed each year. The president would nominate the next justice 60-days before a justice rotates off the court. If there is no vote before the justice rotates off, the appointment is automatically confirmed. Voting down a justice would require a 70% majority.
With 4 justices appointed each term, the stakes would be lowered, and the best justices, regardless of age, could nominated.
YES! This is exactly the kind of thing that would reduce the randomness and significance of the SCOTUS sweepstakes. Mayor Pete had a similarly targeted reform plan for SCOTUS that made it similar to an arbitration panel--there'd be a set of conservative justices and a set of liberal justices and they'd have to agree on the members of a third "neutral" set of justices. The problem is, much like the Electoral College, these kinds of reforms would take an amendment to accomplish and currently our process is too fractured to deliver anything like that.
Trump says he’ll name his nominee by this weekend. We have 2 GOP senators that support the “Nov 4 winner should choose” idea. Alexander has said he supports Trump’s plan so I guess the question marks are Romney and maybe Gardner and Grassley?
Meanwhile, Romney is making the news jabber rounds as a potential Biden Secretary of State.
I think the bolded part is inaccurate. The number of members on the Supreme Court was set at 9 by legislation, not a Constitutional amendment, in 1869. So in 2021 Dem majorities in both houses could pass a law upping that number, which could be signed by a Dem president. Whether they would do so, I don’t know. Nor does anyone know, right now, whether Dems will win the White House and Senate. Very complicated politics, but virtually everything has been thrown out the window since 2016 election.