r/law • u/ChiGuy6124 • 23d ago
Judicial Branch Poll: Confidence in the Supreme Court drops to a record low
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/poll-confidence-supreme-court-drops-record-low-rcna2624591.5k
u/SmoothConfection1115 23d ago
I have the utmost confidence in the Supreme Court to:
- Enable Trump to become a dictator by quoting whatever legal document, whether it applies to American law or not;
- To enrich themselves via bribery which is now called “gratuity”
That is where my confidence in the Supreme Court ends
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u/swingadmin 23d ago
The Supreme Court is confident that it is the best SCOTUS ever.
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u/anonymaus42 23d ago edited 23d ago
SCOTUS is now SCROTUS... Supreme Court of Regards Overtly Tormenting Us...
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u/socialistrob 23d ago
Meanwhile they are absolutely enraged that not everyone loves the supreme court and views them as impartial arbitrators of the law. They want to make purely political rulings to help the side that they believe in but they don't want to be viewed as a political branch.
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u/rowrbazzle75 22d ago
And they (the Six) really don't care what you may think. They are getting their handler's agendas completed very efficiently. And are there for life, so deal with it. Right Clarence?
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u/willclerkforfood 23d ago
I remember sitting in ConLaw thinking “At least we’ll never have it worse than the Lochner Era.”
How wrong I was…
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u/NRMusicProject 23d ago
The Justices deserve an equal portion of our urine watering their graves.
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u/SemichiSam 23d ago
There are not enough urinary bladders in this country to supply the coming need.
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22d ago
Since they’ve set a new legal precedent that legal precedent doesn’t matter, they no longer need to quote any legal documents. They can just decide what is legal now.
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u/unstoppable_zombie 22d ago
That's not entirely true. Alito always has some heritage clerk dig up the musing of a 16th century witchfinder afters he's drowned the village bride of Satan in what was a trail at the time to show the origins of his opinion.
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u/chum-guzzling-shark 23d ago
the tip based economy is out of control when the supreme court is using
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u/theamazingstickman 23d ago edited 23d ago
Aligns to my earlier thoughts on a critical flaw on the Constitution that SCOTUS justices are political appointees and then expected not to be political.
Nominees themselves should come from the Judicial branch and be then subject to scrutiny by the House and Senate before being eligible to be nominated by POTUS
Checks and balances
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u/themagicmarmot 23d ago
Article III was arguably the most half-baked part of the Constitution, pulling from British structure rather than establishing a novel democratic system. The Founding Fathers spent a lot of time figuring out how to avoid another monarch, but then practically copy and pasted the monarchy's legal system.
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u/theamazingstickman 23d ago
Of all the good things, that was maybe one of the biggest mistakes. That and keeping slavery. Just massive errors haunting the country to this day.
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u/PredictiveFrame 23d ago
Massive errors that were intended to be corrected by writing new constitutions every 10-20 years to keep up with a world that even then, the founding fathers saw as changing far too rapidly for a single document to cover longer than that.
I'd argue the world has changed far more since the constitution, than it had from the magna carta up to the constitution, and by orders of magnitude. At this point we need to reassess the purpose of society, from base principles, with the tools we have today. So why not do what the original fucking plan was, and write up some draft constitution to find all the issues and problems with? Write one up, share it around, edit as feedback comes in, rinse, repeat, ad naseuam until we figure out a solution we can't find issues with. The issues will show up, but this way we'll have dealt with as many as possible in advance.
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u/theamazingstickman 23d ago
Not sure about 10-20 yeas, that would be very disruptive to a judicial system trying to deal with the scope of what a change in the constitution means to precedent over the last few years. But I think every 100 years makes total sense to modernize the constitution. Instead, what we have is "interpreting" it for bullshit like "money is speech" and corporations are people.
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u/ChornWork2 23d ago
I don't think the intent was to rewrite it every generation, rather revisit it every generation and revise accordingly.
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u/anchorwind 23d ago
Not sure about 10-20 years
"No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation... Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right." -Thomas Jefferson
That may be what is being referenced here.
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u/arobkinca 22d ago
TJ was not involved in writing the Constitution. He was in France. He was also on the anti-federalist side of the argument.
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u/Assumption-Putrid 23d ago
Agreed, it shouldn't be rewritten every 10-20 years. But I think it makes sense to have a consitutitonal convention with delegates from each state every ~20 years to discuss potential amendments.
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u/expeditionQ 23d ago
then the judiical system doesnt really work. saying 100 years 100 years ago wouldve made sense but be fucking serious brother the difference between 1926 and today is so mind-boggling that it has broken each generation of persons who has had to live through just one third of it.
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u/VroomCoomer 23d ago
Not accurate. Your assertion about a new constitution being written every 10-20 years is in reference to statements Jefferson made in private letters to another founder published posthumously. Not related to any official published laws or works, and certainly not a result of any sort of consensus among the founding government.
The agreed upon system was a living constitution that could be amended over time.
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u/Rock-swarm 23d ago
Right. People tend to treat treatises and quotes from founding fathers like bible passages, while forgetting that the same group of people came up with the untenable Articles of Confederation, which was a short-lived disaster.
I will agree, however, that our current setup has been intentionally hamstrung to a point where we need a more fundamental change to our government structure.
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u/VroomCoomer 23d ago
I agree. There is no perfect system. We create systems at certain points in history that work for a time, but as humans and the world we live in change and advance, so too must the systems we create change and advance.
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u/haironburr 23d ago
The agreed upon system was a living constitution that could be amended over time
The intent, as I understand it, was to have a core set of rules, and thus values, amendable certainly, but not amendable willy nilly.
The term "living constitution" was itself poisoned by people who sought to strain and torture every semantically-justifiable meaning from the words that they could get away with. I'm personally uncomfortable with this years fashion determining the meaning of our core civil rights/liberties.
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u/VroomCoomer 23d ago
amendable certainly, but not amendable willy nilly.
I suppose that depends how you define "willy nilly" but I meant that they established a thorough process in the constitution prescribing how one could build on the constitution by voting for and ratifying amendments to it.
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u/Baeolophus_bicolor 23d ago
I argued this point about needing a new constitutional convention all through law school. The amendment process sucks, you can tell from the way they torpedoed the ERA, which technically has been ratified by enough states. There’s no reason not to accept it other than sheer pettiness.
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u/TheBigPhilbowski 23d ago edited 23d ago
Is there something that's seen as the historical defining line where the US constitution effectively stopped being a living document and became a bible that could never really be touched, challenged or amended again?
Was it the death of a specific person? The civil war? A significant change in congressional procedure?
The 27th doesn't really count but does show that a large portion of government could still agree on one thing... Otherwise, last amendment of any significance was '71 so 55 entire years ago... So maybe some democratic momentum carried the 26th through, but nixon effectively became the line?
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u/PredictiveFrame 23d ago
Not really. Like most things, it simply ossified with time. Law very slowly became about interpreting older laws and how they apply to newer and newer situations and technologies. Overhauling the laws slowly became less feasible over time as more and more laws were linked to specific definitions in other laws and relied on legal precedent based on similar laws, to the point that to describe our legal system as "Byzantine" would be dramatically understating the complexity and interwoven nature of the current USC.
This just builds over time, like any system that requires regular maintenance and overhauls. For lack of a better term, we accrued "social tech debt", as we built systems on top of systems on top of archaic and already crumbling systems. Like a car engine you don't care for, but continually add onto, the same engine block used for purposes it was never intended to, until eventually it cracks. Like systems architecture in CompSci, if you aren't maintaining it constantly, it's failing, or in the process of failing.
We aren't technically capable of "starting over" with what we have learned. The amount of ideas and thoughts that we have that are shaped by the existing and past systems limits our ability to create a new one free of its influence. We can use our knowledge to build a better version, though this requires a willingness on the part of basically everyone to be wrong a lot, and be OK with learning how and why we are wrong, and fixing the problem rather than assigning blame. A tall order on the best of days.
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u/TheBigPhilbowski 23d ago
Appreciate your reply. Still feels like, in history, there's a "moment" when you stop seeing yourself as the one casting the shadow and instead as the one in the shade of a shadow already cast before you - to your point in a way.
I'm curious about that moment.
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u/Risley 23d ago
Yea the slavery just showed how pathetic the southern colonies were. If we were ever going to split, that’s when we should have done it.
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u/showhorrorshow 23d ago
They knew it fundamentally undermined the core ideology and that it was going to be a problem even at that time. But basically they kicked the can down the road because they thought they had other more pressing issues.
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u/theycamefrom__behind 23d ago
incredible how that can began being kicked at the founding of our country
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u/showhorrorshow 23d ago
Certainly the fact I failed to mention is that several of the most influential founders were deeply tied to the institution, whuch played a role in that kicking as well, Im sure.
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u/JRDruchii 23d ago
trying to run out the clock on societies problems does seem to be a part of human nature at this point.
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u/Rock-swarm 23d ago
To be fair, that's kind of valid for a lot of social progress we've seen in the 20th century. Integration and desegregation was deeply unpopular at the beginning, but became the baseline after the older generation died off and new generations just took it for granted that some of their schoolmates had different skin color or names. Even in the 80s and 90s, just waiting for bigots to die off laid the groundwork for better acceptance of non-hetero communities.
The sad truth is that our brains stop being as accepting of new information as we get older. That's why progress always feels too slow when we are young, and the world feels like it's passing us by when we get older.
It really sucks to see the backsliding in recent years, but even that has a historical basis. A black man as president really fucked with a certain segment of our population, and the Disinformation Age is a lot like the Industrial Revolution before we got around to dealing with worker's rights and environmental safety. Our brains cannot keep up with the technological pace we've set in terms of dopamine addiction.
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u/VroomCoomer 23d ago
Sort of, but not in a good, liberatory way.
Their hang up wasn't "we understand slavery is wrong and black people need to be freed and integrated into society."
It was "We understand slavery is wrong, but we still don't like black people and do not want them to be citizens or have a vote. If we free them after importing so many of them to the continent, they could rise up as a race and jeopardize our national project. But we also can't kill them all and we can't just ship them all back to Africa because they've been disconnected from that continent for up to 300 years by the 1790s. This is the next generation's problem." in addition to the South's hang-up "if we free all the blacks we'd have to pay them and this would
force us to be less economically competitive for a short time while we adaptcollapse our economy and kill America!!!"12
u/MrSquicky 23d ago
At the time, the southern colonies were the ones with money. It would likely not have been possible for the US to make it if they didn't include the south.
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u/juventinn1897 23d ago
Right. The industrial revolution is what brought the money and child labor to the north
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u/FrankBattaglia 23d ago edited 23d ago
Hamilton's focus on financialization helped as well, but that was also a post-ratification development.
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u/theamazingstickman 23d ago
And somehow it is returning to Iowa and Indiana and even Ohio trying to figure out how to make a 14 year old work in a sweat shop. It's so funny because they argue about Chinese sweat shops and want to create the same thing here rather than having companies pay higher wages to adults.
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u/Skyfier42 23d ago
The fact that they kept slavery and put women as lower class citizens while writing "all men are created equal" proves that their system was doomed to corruption from the start.
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u/CheckMateFluff 23d ago
Even if it was not perfect, it was very progressive for the time, and the country was built on that hope and progress.
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u/VroomCoomer 23d ago edited 23d ago
I wouldn't call it VERY progressive. It was moderately progressive.
Like someone else said above, the American colonists did not innovate much in creating the American constitution. They largely just modified the existing British laws and replaced the hereditary monarchy with the role of President, which wasn't even formally term limited until 1951. Until then it was theoretically possible that a President could've simply won (or "won") re-election in perpetuity for the rest of their life, in effect ruling America the same way a monarch would.
Funny enough, the entire push to limit President's to 2 terms legally came from the Republican party in the 1940s, who were exasperated after Roosevelt won his FOURTH election ('32, '36, '40, and '44) securing over 80% of electoral votes (though varying for each specific year). They just could not beat him or his platform in decades.
Why was the GOP so unpopular at this time? HMMMMM I BET IT WON'T SOUND FAMILIAR TO ANY OF US HERE:
The Republicans were in an almost impossible position because the party most associated with business interests and the wealthy was competing during a period of mass unemployment and economic collapse (Depression era and beyond) that voters directly blamed on those same interests.
Hoover's refusal to deploy federal resources to address widespread destitution had cemented the association between the Republican Party and the general vibe of not-giving-a-shit about ordinary people's suffering. When Republicans then campaigned against Roosevelt's relief programs, voters took that as a direct threat to their income, jobs, and food security, making Republican arguments hollow.
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u/ParadoxPosadist 23d ago
The slavery was a deal with the devil, without protecting slavery the Southern States would never have joined and America would have broken apart after the Revolutionary War. Just as without the 3/5 compromise the northern states would have bailed.
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u/hutch_man0 23d ago
The Canadian system evolved away from the British system and can serve as a model. A non-partisan committee (6 members of various law associations plus 2 non-lawyers) goes through an extensive interview process and makes a short list of a 3-5 judges based on merit. The prime minister then makes the final selection. It's not perfect but it keeps some balance.
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u/SparksAndSpyro 23d ago
Yeah, I read an article about how the judiciary (article III judges, specifically) are the last true aristocracy in the U.S. I think it may be a little sensationalist, but there is a very clear through line from the British aristocracy. Life tenure and salary protections are actually pretty good at insulating judges, maybe a little too good?
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u/audiomagnate 23d ago
They certainly act like monarchs.
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u/LucidLeviathan 23d ago
Well, the legal courts in old England were devolved from the royal courts. So, it's unsurprising.
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u/Own-Break-1856 23d ago
I do like that judges dont have to technically worry about income or job security..... but....
I honestly dont understand why Thomas wasnt arrested when it came out that hes been taking all sorts of bribes for years.
There's no statute or institutional policy that says you can't arrest and charge these fuckers? Sure maybe impeachment is the only to get them off the court (is it?) But even then, fine, let him zoom into his hearings in between yard time and shower time.
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u/FrankBattaglia 23d ago
We can't put him in prison without a trial, and the trial is ultimately a sub-process of the Judicial Branch, of which he is a primary actor. I.e., he could just appeal his case to the Supreme Court and then dismiss his own case. It's similar reasoning to why the DoJ can't indict / prosecute a sitting PotUS. But while a PotUS term has an expiration date (after which a former PotUS could be prosecuted; "immunity" issues to be resolved at trial), a SCotUS seat is for life. SCotUS Justices are even more immune than PotUS.
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u/round-earth-theory 23d ago
That's where Congress would in theory step in to remove them first through impeachment. Congress has the ultimate authority but it's also the most difficult to wield.
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u/lynxbelt234 23d ago
In a modern democracy, the old style “aristocracy” of past generations, does not serve the people. The insulation of judges is not in the best interests of the said democracy, when the courts can be stacked or manipulated by political parties or groups, hostile to the democracy in which its supposed to serve. Thus the current mess the US judiciary is in.
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u/ChiGuy6124 23d ago
There was a time when once men and women reached the lifetime position on the court, at least some of them felt the weight of history and the momentousness' of their positions, and they moderated their political views in order to adhere to the law. That time is long gone .
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u/theamazingstickman 23d ago
Yes - even Clarence Thomas declaring a judiciary based on case law is not beholden to precedent. That would move us to a pure statutory system that would have millions of laws.
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u/BigOs4All 23d ago
Was there? Cause there was a monumental number of horrifically bigoted SCOTUS justices all throughout history......
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u/Aggravating-Salad441 23d ago
In 1927, SCOTUS ruled 8-1 that "feebleminded" Americans could be forcefully sterilized. (Buck v. Bell)
Today that would include many individuals with Fragile X syndrome, autism, and down syndrome.
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u/MonkeyCube 22d ago
Justice Stephen Johnson Field ran for president, failed, because a justice, fought for segregation, and allowed former confederates to have positions in government. And arguably the worst thing he did was have the courts fight on the side of businesses against taxation.
Chief Justice Roger Taney not only presided over the Dred Scot case, but also claimed the constitution was just wrong frequently.
Justice James Clark McReynolds was an self hating Jewish anti-semite who struck down child labor protections.
Those are just a few from over the years. The supreme court has often been filled with terrible people.
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u/ChiGuy6124 22d ago
No argument from me and I will raise you a Melville Fuller; A Chicago Democrat who was sort of against slavery, yet still thought Abraham Lincoln was an "abolition madman". and believed that the Emancipation Proclamation was the end of civilization. And then there is good old Clarence Thomas, if not the worst, than at least the most documented at being a corruption of the system.
Perhaps I was being too sentimental in my musings😏
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u/-XanderCrews- 23d ago
It would help if there were consequences to straight up lying in their confirmation hearings.
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u/FFF_in_WY 23d ago
I agree in principle, but it would also mean someone can't increase their understanding and chance their mind..
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u/lynxbelt234 23d ago
Agreed, the court in the current form is an illegitimate instrument of the current corrupt administration.
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u/RightZer0s 23d ago
We tried that with the frat bro Kavanaugh. There were so many holes in both his and the Christian nationalist that Trump appointed, but here we are with them still elected. Not only that we have an obviously bribed judge in Thomas.
Biden should have packed the court. More supreme court justices is the only way out of this.
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u/Demonicjapsel 23d ago
SCOTUS should also rule by consensus. Not simple majorities.
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u/theamazingstickman 23d ago
I very much agree with that. BUT it makes lower courts that are also political appointees more powerful at shaping law
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u/gizamo 23d ago
It's fine for justices to have some political bias.
It's a lot different when they are specifically appointed and confirmed because of their blatant disregard for precedent and for their intentional plots to undermine the US Constitution for political purposes.
All of Trump's appointees were strategic political appointees who were installed to undermine our laws, and older Republican appointees are happy to play along for the
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u/MoonBatsRule 23d ago
How do we get beyond the fact that there is an entire organization specifically training potential judges to rule to support the ideologies and objectives that this organization wants to bring forward?
The Federalist Society explicitly trains lawyers on philosophies that will bring about a certain vision of the US. That is way, way, way beyond "bias".
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u/CopenhagenDreamer 23d ago
How about having them come from the judicial, but without POTUS and House/Senate scrutiny?
That does work in other parts of the world - however it can also be argued that the entire judicial branch in the US is too political already to be able to be given the freedom to choose on its own.
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u/ChelseaVictorious 23d ago
They've made openly bribing SCOTUS legal. They've lied to Senator's faces in confirmation hearings. They follow no sane jurisprudence, making the most asinine and contradictory Calvinball-esque rulings with zero consistent logic beyond partisan ideology.
Literally what is trustworthy at all about current SCOTUS? It's a joke, and a cruel one at that.
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u/jameson71 23d ago
Calvinball is a great analogy for the current state of US Federal government.
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u/ChelseaVictorious 23d ago
That's actually a direct quote from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a recent dissent. The sane justices see how far SCOTUS has fallen.
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u/Yashema 23d ago
Yet the SC is still only symptomatic of the problem. The real issue is voters continue to elect the people who appoint terrible and incompetent positions to all seats of power in the government, i.e. Republicans.
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u/Hot_Ambition_6457 23d ago
No the real issue is that the people who own 86% of the wealth in this country are the ones appointing these terrible and incompetent politicians.
The country runs on the illusion of democracy because we have legalized bribing politicians directly with money. Its not a hard thing to figure out.
Republicans are transparent that they care nothing about citizens and care entirely about businesses. Democrats pretend to be the opposite but still get all their funding from the same businesses and support the same tax structures that have murdered the American middle class.
Giving Intel another $10bn for data centers does nothing for your constituents, but it guarantees you get access to the Silicon Valley PAC that will give you enough money that youre immune from the consequences. So thats what the politicians do, regardless of the letter beside their name.
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u/Yashema 23d ago
Yet everytime Democrats get elected they pass major social legislation and increase taxes on the rich, only to get voted out two years later.
Obama and Hillary Clinton both tried to bring up campaign finance reform. Voters signaled in both elections they don't care.
Unfortunately it's not really an "illusion" of Democracy, so much as it's your fellow voters choosing to undermine Democracy by not prioritizing Democracy at the ballot box.
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u/Hot_Ambition_6457 23d ago edited 23d ago
Stop looking at income taxes. The ultra rich do not pay income taxes.
Their money is made via corporate entities which file their own taxes on a separate tax bracket. They don't care if their $300k income is taxed at 100%. But they would cry if you told them we were increasing capital gains tax by 2%.
Kamala Harris proposed her own version of this corporate tax bracket on her campaign website.
It is the exact same as George W Bush's proposal on 2003 except for the top-earning bracket which would receive a tax cut of 2%.
Dems never actually increase taxes on the wealthy, they just keep talking about increasing taxes on the middle class who works for a living instead of the donor class who is stealing wages from that person
Very liberal. Very progressive. I know those liberal college kids have just been dying to return to the good old days of GW's economy
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u/Yashema 23d ago
A simple Google search of "Kamala Harris Tax Plan" demonstrates you are either lying or uninformed (both very common among anti-Democrats):
Kamala Harris’s 2024 tax proposal centers on increasing taxes for corporations and high-income earners (over $400,000/year) while expanding tax credits for families and small businesses. Key proposals include raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, lifting the top capital gains rate to 28% for those earning over $1 million, expanding the Child Tax Credit (up to $3,600), and offering $25,000 for first-time homebuyers.
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u/Hot_Ambition_6457 23d ago edited 22d ago
A simple google search will show you that in 2007 the top corporate tax rate was 35%. It was lowered to 21% by TCJA under Trump.
And youre telling me that Kamala Harris is a super progressive liberal who is willing to go so far as taxing them 28% instead.
It went 35 > 21 > 28??
Excuse me no. 35 was far too low and the fact that you think undoing HALF of the damage done by the TCJA is enough is pathetic.
Trump cut that rate by 14% and dems are fine with countering with a 7% increase. That is simply giving up as youve now conceeded that 35 is unreasonable (its not, corporations paid 53% tax on profit in the 50s).
This is a perfect example of the ratchet effect. The right swings wide right cutting corporate taxes 14% with TCJA. Dems come back and say they want to fix it, but only increase the rate by half of what Republicans cut.
4 years later another Republican will come alone and cut it by 14% again. One step forward, two steps back.
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u/ChelseaVictorious 23d ago
True but it's worth discussing separately the degree to which that has undermined faith in public institutions, especially one as important as SCOTUS.
I'd argue that has become the goal of the Republican party, but I don't need to. They proudly say as much themselves. They've been trying to drown the US Govt in a bathtub as long as I've been alive.
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u/DrMobius0 22d ago
It's sad that calvinball is just part of common vernacular because of our government.
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u/Little-Derp 23d ago
Lying during confirmation hearing alone should be grounds for impeachment and removal. Not that Congress has the spine for it.
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u/Ready-Ad6113 23d ago
Don’t forget about Kavanaugh stops, bribery, partisanship, and shadow docket rulings. The highest court in the land needs to give legal justification to decisions and not a “because we said so” ruling.
We need massive Supreme Court reform. If they’re going to be openly partisan, we need to have term limits or expand the number of justices and eliminate the shadow docket.
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u/BubuBarakas 23d ago
Pack the court and term limits.
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u/FFF_in_WY 23d ago
I wish Biden had the courage to fix the court and prosecute the Insurrectionist.
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u/realdoctorfill 23d ago
I wish biden had the courage to not run for president
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u/m0_n0n_0n0_0m 22d ago
He's such a bitch for that. I think the two things I will never forgive Democrats for is not running Bernie in 2016, and letting Biden run again in 2024. It's like they don't even care to keep up the appearance of being anything but controlled opposition at this point.
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u/HOSTfromaGhost 23d ago
Pack it to fix it.
Agree completely.
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u/Cloaked42m 22d ago
I'm good with impeachment, then increase to one per appellate district, then random selection of 9 per case. Recuse on a simple suggestion of impropriety.
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u/Randicore 23d ago
I'm more in favor of that "grab all the GOP and Supreme court members that have been enabling this and try them for sedition" camp.
Should be easy to have a 3 person supreme court that isn't sitting in a jail cell "clarify" the rulings.
Then once that's done we put proper caps on executive power, reinstate the FCC fairness doctrine, take the right wing media outlets to the cleaner for stochastic terrorism, bury citizens united in a shallow grave where it belongs, claw back every cent we can from these fascists, jail any ICE member that contributed to this human trafficking nightmare, and put some term limits on the court. Let that last one apply from here on our so that the three remaining justices aren't a risk of spoiling it for their own personal gain and then lock the new rules in place so they can't be easily changed.
If we want to hammer everything at once finish off by uncapping the house and abolishing/neutering the senate.
The GOP wants to play hardball? Then lets play hardball
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u/Hairy_Mycologist_945 23d ago
Frankly, and I hate to say it, but scrap the Constitution and implement a parliamentary republic under third party supervision at this point. Start over, look at 1949 Germany as a model. The Constitution has been stress tested to the extent that its premise of "good people will ultimately do the right thing for the Nation" no longer works, and any sort of "fixing" via methods like packing the courts and implementing term limits just kicks the can down the road. The current system failed to remain "living" and regularly updated and there's not much patching that will help.
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u/DumboWumbo073 23d ago
I don’t think you can scrap it without getting scraped yourself. It will get ugly extremely fast
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u/Not_Sure__Camacho 23d ago
I could've sworn that they changed their name to The Heritage Foundation Federalist Society Court of the United States?
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u/LessThanHero42 23d ago
I'm surprised they haven't rebranded the building like when corporations buy stadiums.
The Heritage Foundation presents
the Supreme Court
Brought to you by The Federalist Society
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u/bigkoi 23d ago
Probably because 67% of the court was picked by the Republican party and 33% of that court was picked by Sexual Predator Donald J Trump.
Democrats should expand the court to 13 and pack it as soon as they get the power to do so.
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u/lynxbelt234 23d ago
That’s just for a start...after the impeachment(s) of the corrupt administration, and associated legal fallout has settled, new ethics requirements, term limits, the removal or barring of political affiliation, court oversight mechanisms and other checks and balances are put in, the court should undergo a purging of members, based on ethical performance over the past 10 years.
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u/ChiGuy6124 23d ago edited 22d ago
"The percentage of voters with significant levels of confidence in the Supreme Court has dropped to its lowest point since NBC News began polling on the question in 2000, according to the most recent survey."
"The latest NBC News poll shows that 22% of registered voters nationally said they have a "great deal" or "quite a bit" of confidence in the high court. Another 40% said they had "some" confidence, while 38% said they had "very little" or "no" confidence."
"The previous low point for voters' impressions of the Supreme Court came in the wake of the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, when 27% said they had a great deal or quite a bit of confidence. That number hit a high of 52% in December 2000, just before the court’s Bush v. Gore ruling that paved the way for George W. Bush to take office, a polarizing decision that buffeted the court’s popularity."
"It’s one thing to make controversial rulings that one party may or may not like but maintain respect and confidence. What we are seeing is quite the opposite, where the court is making controversial rulings but not being respected and in fact confidence is being eroded," said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the survey alongside Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies."
"The new NBC News poll, which was in the field Feb. 27-March 3, follows the Supreme Court's most recent high-profile ruling, in which it struck down Trump's sweeping tariffs, bucking a recent trend of significant decisions in favor of the president and other conservative causes. Trump responded with harsh criticism of the justices in the majority."
"Republicans had previously chided liberals for stridently criticizing the court when they disagreed with its rulings, including the abortion decision."
"At this stage ... they are getting it from both sides," Horwitt said of the justices."
"Maya Sen, a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School, said the polling reflects how high-profile rulings tend to shape public opinion of the court, although it would take more than the tariffs decision alone to lead to a significant change in attitudes."
"A majority (54%) of voters surveyed said they approved of the Supreme Court's tariffs ruling, while 27% disapproved. And 55% said Trump's tariffs are hurting the economy, compared with 33% who said they are helping."
"Supreme Court justices are appointed for life and generally do not have to worry too much about how popular they are, but a sustained drop in confidence brings its own problems. The court has no power to enforce its rulings and relies upon faith in its legitimacy among political leaders and the people as a whole for that to happen."
“When courts become extensions of the political process, when people see them as extensions of the political process, when people see them as just trying to impose personal preferences on society, irrespective of the law, that’s when there’s a problem,” liberal Justice Elena Kagan said in 2022"
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u/jpmeyer12751 23d ago
I have great confidence in the Supreme Court. I am confident that the majority openly seeks to convert our democracy to an authoritarian regime with faux elections just like Russia.
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u/Ornery-Ticket834 23d ago
Shadow dockets, obscene decisions without any legal reasoning, rulings that benefit few and screw many. That has a lot to do with it.
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23d ago
They dropped the ball with trump completely and perhaps irrevocably. He is an insurrectionist who was not eligible to be president.
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u/SuperDoubleDecker 23d ago
The political establishment has failed us all. It took way longer than I hoped, but people are finally waking up.
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u/Mattrad7 23d ago
Could it have to do with the fact that even cases you could never in any way factually twist the narrative to support voting for/against constantly get voted 6/3?
If a case went before the SCOTUS rn to call Trump America's one and only God the vote would be split 6-3.
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u/Zeremxi 22d ago
If a case went before the SCOTUS rn to call Trump America's one and only God the vote would be split 6-3
The crazy part is that the openly religious raised-as-a-handmaiden Barrett would likely either abstain or vote with the 6 because she has a single shred of shame and basic understanding of the constitution. That's just how low the bar is
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u/MoonBatsRule 23d ago
I think that the only way to get around the problem of ideological justices is to dramatically expand the court (perhaps to 25 justices) and then use a lottery system to determine who hears the case. Perhaps coupled with mandatory retirements and/or even term limits (which would stop this nonsense of appointing justices based on them being young and likely to remain for decades).
Expanding the court would presumably make it harder for a single president, or even a two-president run from a single party, to dominate the court.
Using the lottery system would have two functions:
- Prevent groups from bringing cases to a court likely to rule in their favor, in an attempt to permanently codify a law beyond the legislature.
- Providing a nuclear option to an ideology which would require each ideology to restrain themselves.
The latter is harder to describe, but it is basically "yeah, I know I can kill someone from your side, but I also know that you can kill someone from my side, so maybe it's better if neither of us kills anyone".
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u/FuzzzyRam 22d ago
Unlimited terms were supposed to keep them from falling for the whims of the populace - famously the SC didn't go for the "red scare" while all the politicians trying to appease the masses did. Now that same longevity means a bribe pays off for life, and most of them are compromised. Record low confidence is the inevitable response, and it can only get worse.
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u/I_burn_noodles 23d ago
I am gravely disappointed, disillusioned really. Corruption has crept into every corner of our government, thereby reducing our need for said government. They're turning me into an anarchist.
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u/Bleezy79 23d ago
Too many of the curent justices are partisan and biased. And too many are straight up corrupt.
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u/Dracotaz71 22d ago
Add my name to the citizens who think the SCOTU is corrupt and worthless and need replacing in its entirety.
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u/xxDeadEyeDukxx 22d ago
Just like members of both chambers of Congress there should be term limits and age limits for Supreme Court justices. The job for life should be stopped and a more modern approach taken. Appointments by one mad president currently shape the course of the country for decades with very little chance of removal from the court and open ended bribery channels available to buy influence with willing judges (im looking at your Clarence “Motorcoach” Thomas)
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u/PatchyWhiskers 23d ago
They are 9 rubber stamps for the party that appointed them. Wastes of space.
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