The Supreme Court is at a very topsy turvey place. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg tipped the court precipitously to the right. Now, Samuel Alito is displaying raw judicial power of a sort not previously seen and he’s looking to send women’s rightS and the abortion issue back a hundred years or more.
That has led to Adam Schiff raising the topic of more Supreme Court justices. It’s not entirely a bad idea. What could happen is that SCOTUS would become more like a panel of justices and not all of them would have to hear every single case, or vote, if there were enough of them. In fact, it might be more efficient.
Into that brief background, Mike Lee throws this goof ball.
Republican Senator Mike Lee said if Democrats pack the court it would end up looking like “The Intergalactic Senate in the Star Wars series.” pic.twitter.com/jhrWPh0BEp
— PatriotTakes ?? (@patriottakes) May 7, 2022
This is Mike Lee’s way of saying that he has no idea what the hell the new court configuration would look like so he’s shooting from the hip and being absurd.
Right now, it looks like The Vogons from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ? pic.twitter.com/c6RtPFGUQE
— When Should I Start To Worry? ? (@nopittie) May 7, 2022
There are 13 judicial circuits and one judge for each would be 13 justices. It’s not a bad idea. And even if it went to where Mike Lee is saying it could go, with an ever increasing number of justices, if they served as a panel of judges, and were assigned to try different cases, that could work, too.
One justice for each circuit is a really good idea – it would actually lower the load on the ones dealing with two or more circuits.
I’m so sorry that Mike Lee knows less about this than the average person reading here or at the mother-ship.
My only objection to soon to be Justice Jackson is that she’s yet another member of the Harvard & Yale stranglehold on the Court. (Barrett went to law school at Notre Dame – a pretty good law school but there are quite a few higher ranked ones like Michigan and University of Chicago in the midwest – and others around the country) Also, the whole DC Court of Appeals pipeline is over represented. Yes, it hears a disproprortionate number of important cases but there’s a whole country out there beyond the beltway that has a different view of the overall picture.
Diversity of race and gender is hugely important but when it comes to the words “Equal Justice Under Law” carved into the stone above the entrance to the SCOTUS building diversity of legal education and life/legal experience is important too. We don’t have anything close to that and haven’t for a very long time. Too long. Not that it ever existed but there once was more than there is now.
Like others I believe that each Circuit should be represented on the Court. Not just thirteen Justices so there’s one for each Circuit but work towards having Justices who lived and served as federal judges from each Circuit. In my perfect world/SCOTUS we’d have TWO Justices from each Circuit with a separate Chief Justice for a total of twenty-seven. Seven Justice Panels could hear cases much as happens with three judge panels in appellate courts with the potential for an En Banc hearing for certain cases if the Justices so choose, or automatically if a ruling by a panel has more than one (or perhaps two) dissenting votes on a given case.
That would take a LOT of the political bullshit out of things, and put it back on interpreting the law. No one person could have the kind of sway a forceful Justice currently can have, where they might have only one or two staunch allies on a given case and in turn would only have to convince one or two others to join in.
I could write a lot more on this, but at the very least I think we need to move to thirteen Justices, and that a real effort needs to be made to pull new ones from ANY law school besides Harvard or Yale, and also from Circuits (especially the huge ninth circuit) that haven’t had someone who served in them on the Court in far too long. Basically, force the Justices to engage in a wider discussion and from different legal and professional perspectives than their fucking little CLIQUE has been doing most of my life!
I think of a line from the movie On The Basis of Sex where RBG makes a note that her husband was startled by (if was from one of his classes she attended while he was recovering from testicular cancer) which was (I think I’ve got it) “A court should not be affected by the weather of the day, but by the climate of the times.” IOW the current little club, insulated in their little Harvard/Yale and DC Circuit enclave finds it all too easy to ignore the climate of the times. They are woefully out of touch, and should be forced to deal directly with people outside their own same old-same old experiences when discussing cases around that conference table. Same with their clerks.
I seem to get the impression that Mike E. Lee is more concerned with keeping the court under Republiqanon control than the actual number of judges
An intergalactic supreme court would insure a broader representation of citizens and force the court to weigh their decisions based on constitutional law, not on religious grounds. Why is that a bad thing? Because R’s would lose their fundamentalist platforms and be forced to accept the world has changed and they’re being left in the dust..
Which justices aren’t Catholic? There may be two. Since justices are not supposed to put their religious choices into their decisions why does it leave the many at the mercy of the few?
Biden seems to do that personal fight lots better than SCOTUS.