"The Supreme Court’s attacks on voting rights are about rigging elections for Republicans," said Rep. Greg Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Term limits for Supreme Court justices is a good idea but increasing the number is not. More Supreme Court justices is more spending of taxpayers money. Supreme Court justices should serve 6 years. After 6 years, they would have to be reappointed and approved.
Gerrymandering could be stopped by having a computer program draw congressional districts or proportional representation. Democrats should propose and push for these ideas.
Computer programs don’t inherently remove bias. If anything, they obfuscate it. We wouldn’t have less gerrymandering from a computer program, we’d have more. We could require absolutely open and transparent code and data, and that still wouldn’t be enough because the manipulations would be performed right in the open for everyone to see, but it would be ‘okay’ because it’s not illegal. Much like our current system allows for gerrymandering for political purposes, this wouldn’t address the issue, it would just make hiding and obfuscating the reasoning easier.
And as for electing supreme Court judges, if you thought presidential elections and political ads were bad now, it would be 100 times worse if we have to put up with political ads for judges on top of that. It would put more money in politics which is absolutely the wrong direction to go. We need a bigger, more representative supreme Court. We need more courts in general, and more judges to get through the cases that are already in the backlog. Your proposals would exacerbate our existing issues, not help us.
Computer programs don’t inherently remove bias. If anything, they obfuscate it.
That’s incorrect. I could make a completely fair state map with ArcGIS, voter data & about a week’s time. It’s the people working the software that are the problem.
A computer program can’t be biased because it has no emotions. The only input it’s needed are the boundary of a state, the population, where they live, and the desired number of districts. The winning program would be peer-reviewed to ensure the integrity of the program.
No, the selection process would remain unchanged. The President selects and the Senate confirms. The difference in my proposal is the process repeats after six years for a particular justice.
A computer program can be biased, if the software developers who write it are biased.
Also, a six year term on SC Justices would mean that any time there’s a two-term president, by the end of the second term, literally every single SC Justice would have been selected by the same president. That’s a terrible idea.
A 10-year term at least guarantees that there’s a different president in office when one is up for reappointment, and they can be staggered to avoid appointing all at once. But even that’s not so great of an idea, because it would be too volatile. Every time a new president comes in, he would get rid of all or most of his predecessor’s appointments. That wouldn’t restore non-partisanship to the courts, it would make things worse.
Maybe if we’re voting on instance admins, but certainly not for drawing congressional district maps.
Humans can use digital tools to programmatically parse data and run statistical analysis and do whatever else they need to make fully informed decisions, but ultimately it should be humans making those decisions, not a computer.
And before you ask, yes, they should be redrawn by independent redistricting commissions, not state legislatures.
Digital tooling is fine, “autonomous” systems are not.
The winning computer program would be subject to peer-review. This would spot biases.
Yes, 6-year terms are too short. The article suggests 18-year terms. That could very well be the optimum number, but that is a long time for a bad justice to be serving. I would have mathematicians look for the smallest number that would prevent a single President from appointing a majority of justices. They would be allowed to adjust the number of justices.
More Supreme Court justices is more spending of taxpayers money.
fucking hilarious. we spend > 2.5 BILLION per DAY pretending to be the biggest asshole on the planet. a few more justices would amount to ‘functionally zero’, just like that argument.
6 years is a terrible idea. It would allow even 1-term Presidents to select a majority of the justices and get whatever they want, and a 2-term President to appoint every seat.
18 years is correct. It’s the shortest term that doesn’t allow a 2-term President to appoint a majority of the justices (resignationsand draths notwithstanding).
You could be correct. It’s a good problem that could be presented to mathematicians. Find the smallest number that prevents a single President from appointing a majority of SCOTUS justices. Mathematicians would be permitted to change the number of justices. The problem with 18 is that a bad justice would serve a long time, but it might be the only solution.
The number of justices isn’t the reason for 18 years. It’s the length of Presidential administrations. A single administration is normally limited to 8 years, so the length of the SCOTUS term has to be more than double that to prevent them from nominating half the justices.
Six years is too short a term. I think you want a longer term length, because you want change to happen, just not all at once. The real problem with the SCOTUS is that it’s all up to chance when a spot opens up, and since appointments are currently lifetime appointments if you get a judge on the court who is in their 40’s they could serve 40+ years. Republicans were able to engineer a Majority on the Court, in spite of only holding the Presidency for six years since 2008.
If we had term limits, though, then SCOTUS seats would come up for appointment regularly. The impact of filling one sudden vacancy isnt as great if each President was guaranteed to be able to nominate a few every term.
If the Court stays at 9, I would be in favor of 18 year terms. Or, we could increase to 13, and make the terms 13 years. Both scenarios with strict one-term limits. This makes it so a one-term President can’t nominate enough judges to totally remake a court, and if would take about a decade for the Court to really turn over to the point that it might make different rulings.
The problem with 18- and 13-year terms is that a bad justice would remain a long time. In my proposal, a justice can continue serving beyond 6 years if presidents keep selecting him and the Senate continues to confirm him.
Because we’ve never had a case where the most-unpopular President in history was able to rush judicial nominees through the Senate and stack the Court with political hacks who have been credibly accused of sexual assault and drunkenness. The Senate has totally saved us from that.
If we had 18-year terms, we’d have 4 Obama appointees, 2 Biden, and 3 Trump right now. So it would still be 6-3, but the other direction, and it would represent the medium-long term political viewpoint of the American people, not the newest short-term reactionary position that a 6-year term would provide.
18-year terms is a good idea. I just feel uneasy about a bad justice serving that long. Mathematicians should be given the problem of coming up with the smallest number that would prevent a single President from appointing a majority. They would be allowed to change the number of justices.
Bad justices serve for life now. Bad Presidents can stack the Court with bad justices with terms shorter than 18 years.
And the terms aren’t based on the number of justices, but how long a President serves. A President can usually serve up to 8 years. No matter how many justices you have, having shorter terms would allow a President to stack the court. If you have 100 justices with 16 year terms, an 8-year President would get to change 50 of them. At 18-year terms, they could only nominate 4. And more importantly, they’d automatically get to nominate 4. So you can’t have this bullshit situation where we’ve the majority of the electorate vote for a Republican President twice in the last 34 years, but somehow have 2/3 of the justices appointed by Republicans.
If you mean an independent commission, some states already use those for redistricting. There’s no need for a computer program.
Or do you mean by state legislatures, that’s already what the most heavily gerrymandered states already use for redistricting. It would make no difference if they were simply “approving” a computer-generated district map (made with algorithms designed by whom?).
The computer program you suggest is entirely unnecessary and superfluous.
Have you ever met a comp sci professor? They’re so cloistered, with no practical understanding of the world beyond the digital. They shouldn’t have anything to do with electoral reform.
Since gerrymandering exists, a computer program is quite necessary.
Gerrymandering has already been solved in most states by utilizing independent redistricting commissions. Only the most backward states still give that task to their legislatures.
That’s what’s desired. Someone who isn’t interested in politics just whether a computer program is biased. All states would have to use the winning computer program.
So now you’re saying the federal government should impose this computer algorithm on the states? Don’t you realize the constitution explicitly gives electoral power to the states?
Your idea just gets worse and worse the more you try to defend it.
You want more justices so they hear more cases, it’s like 80% of cases requesting supreme Court review never see the Supreme Court because they say they don’t have the time and their caseload is too high.
Good point but then the extra justices would have to be paid with taxpayer money, and more justices would be asking questions in cases before the entire court.
No you’d still have 9 hearing a case you’d just have sets. There’s no rule that says every justice has to hear every case. Staye courts already work this way.
Taxpayers would have to pay these additional judges. The selection process beyond Supreme Court justices could be for a bipartisan committee of scholars to select a set number of qualified individuals to be judge. One of these would be randomly chosen.
The reason term limits aren’t good for the SC is because the constitution shouldn’t be something that changes with the political spectrum. It also prevents them from receiving being targeted or retaliated against for their decisions. It’s supposed to be hard for them to change and redefine the law. What they’re doing now is an abomination. There’s nothing wrong with the way the SC is set up. It’s filled with facists is the problem.
What’s wrong is a literal fascist pedo filled the seats and the majority party approved it for political gain and power. The fix is cutting the head off the snake, not adding more snakes
All of the scotus rulings are reversible by passing more direct laws and amendments to the constitution.
Term limits for Supreme Court justices is a good idea but increasing the number is not. More Supreme Court justices is more spending of taxpayers money. Supreme Court justices should serve 6 years. After 6 years, they would have to be reappointed and approved.
Gerrymandering could be stopped by having a computer program draw congressional districts or proportional representation. Democrats should propose and push for these ideas.
Computer programs don’t inherently remove bias. If anything, they obfuscate it. We wouldn’t have less gerrymandering from a computer program, we’d have more. We could require absolutely open and transparent code and data, and that still wouldn’t be enough because the manipulations would be performed right in the open for everyone to see, but it would be ‘okay’ because it’s not illegal. Much like our current system allows for gerrymandering for political purposes, this wouldn’t address the issue, it would just make hiding and obfuscating the reasoning easier.
And as for electing supreme Court judges, if you thought presidential elections and political ads were bad now, it would be 100 times worse if we have to put up with political ads for judges on top of that. It would put more money in politics which is absolutely the wrong direction to go. We need a bigger, more representative supreme Court. We need more courts in general, and more judges to get through the cases that are already in the backlog. Your proposals would exacerbate our existing issues, not help us.
It’s less about it being a computer program and more about having a set of determinatistic rules we can all agree on.
That’s incorrect. I could make a completely fair state map with ArcGIS, voter data & about a week’s time. It’s the people working the software that are the problem.
A computer program can’t be biased because it has no emotions. The only input it’s needed are the boundary of a state, the population, where they live, and the desired number of districts. The winning program would be peer-reviewed to ensure the integrity of the program.
No, the selection process would remain unchanged. The President selects and the Senate confirms. The difference in my proposal is the process repeats after six years for a particular justice.
A computer program can be biased, if the software developers who write it are biased.
Also, a six year term on SC Justices would mean that any time there’s a two-term president, by the end of the second term, literally every single SC Justice would have been selected by the same president. That’s a terrible idea.
A 10-year term at least guarantees that there’s a different president in office when one is up for reappointment, and they can be staggered to avoid appointing all at once. But even that’s not so great of an idea, because it would be too volatile. Every time a new president comes in, he would get rid of all or most of his predecessor’s appointments. That wouldn’t restore non-partisanship to the courts, it would make things worse.
Open source the program?
Maybe if we’re voting on instance admins, but certainly not for drawing congressional district maps.
Humans can use digital tools to programmatically parse data and run statistical analysis and do whatever else they need to make fully informed decisions, but ultimately it should be humans making those decisions, not a computer.
And before you ask, yes, they should be redrawn by independent redistricting commissions, not state legislatures.
Digital tooling is fine, “autonomous” systems are not.
The winning computer program would be subject to peer-review. This would spot biases.
Yes, 6-year terms are too short. The article suggests 18-year terms. That could very well be the optimum number, but that is a long time for a bad justice to be serving. I would have mathematicians look for the smallest number that would prevent a single President from appointing a majority of justices. They would be allowed to adjust the number of justices.
A few salaries will not make a single difference. If you want to find savings, then drop the defense budget and stop funding Israel.
fucking hilarious. we spend > 2.5 BILLION per DAY pretending to be the biggest asshole on the planet. a few more justices would amount to ‘functionally zero’, just like that argument.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
You could save more pennies by defunding ICE and by stopping the use of american taxpayer dollars to support israel’s welfare state.
6 years is a terrible idea. It would allow even 1-term Presidents to select a majority of the justices and get whatever they want, and a 2-term President to appoint every seat.
18 years is correct. It’s the shortest term that doesn’t allow a 2-term President to appoint a majority of the justices (resignationsand draths notwithstanding).
You could be correct. It’s a good problem that could be presented to mathematicians. Find the smallest number that prevents a single President from appointing a majority of SCOTUS justices. Mathematicians would be permitted to change the number of justices. The problem with 18 is that a bad justice would serve a long time, but it might be the only solution.
The number of justices isn’t the reason for 18 years. It’s the length of Presidential administrations. A single administration is normally limited to 8 years, so the length of the SCOTUS term has to be more than double that to prevent them from nominating half the justices.
True, but it might be difficult to impose term limits because the Constitution says SCOTUS justices have lifetime appointments.
lol like that is the problem here
I have that guy tagged as a right-winger
Six years is too short a term. I think you want a longer term length, because you want change to happen, just not all at once. The real problem with the SCOTUS is that it’s all up to chance when a spot opens up, and since appointments are currently lifetime appointments if you get a judge on the court who is in their 40’s they could serve 40+ years. Republicans were able to engineer a Majority on the Court, in spite of only holding the Presidency for six years since 2008.
If we had term limits, though, then SCOTUS seats would come up for appointment regularly. The impact of filling one sudden vacancy isnt as great if each President was guaranteed to be able to nominate a few every term.
If the Court stays at 9, I would be in favor of 18 year terms. Or, we could increase to 13, and make the terms 13 years. Both scenarios with strict one-term limits. This makes it so a one-term President can’t nominate enough judges to totally remake a court, and if would take about a decade for the Court to really turn over to the point that it might make different rulings.
The problem with 18- and 13-year terms is that a bad justice would remain a long time. In my proposal, a justice can continue serving beyond 6 years if presidents keep selecting him and the Senate continues to confirm him.
With 6-year terms an unpopular President could appoint a majority in the period of their first term, then cancel elections with their backing.
That scenario would involve Congress and his nominated justices going along. Longer term limits would mean a bad justice staying for a long time.
Because we’ve never had a case where the most-unpopular President in history was able to rush judicial nominees through the Senate and stack the Court with political hacks who have been credibly accused of sexual assault and drunkenness. The Senate has totally saved us from that.
If we had 18-year terms, we’d have 4 Obama appointees, 2 Biden, and 3 Trump right now. So it would still be 6-3, but the other direction, and it would represent the medium-long term political viewpoint of the American people, not the newest short-term reactionary position that a 6-year term would provide.
18-year terms is a good idea. I just feel uneasy about a bad justice serving that long. Mathematicians should be given the problem of coming up with the smallest number that would prevent a single President from appointing a majority. They would be allowed to change the number of justices.
Bad justices serve for life now. Bad Presidents can stack the Court with bad justices with terms shorter than 18 years.
And the terms aren’t based on the number of justices, but how long a President serves. A President can usually serve up to 8 years. No matter how many justices you have, having shorter terms would allow a President to stack the court. If you have 100 justices with 16 year terms, an 8-year President would get to change 50 of them. At 18-year terms, they could only nominate 4. And more importantly, they’d automatically get to nominate 4. So you can’t have this bullshit situation where we’ve the majority of the electorate vote for a Republican President twice in the last 34 years, but somehow have 2/3 of the justices appointed by Republicans.
Correct.
Ah, and as we’ve all seen that could never happen… 🙄
/s
Mechal-Hitler would have to pass peer-review.
Peer review by whom?
If you mean an independent commission, some states already use those for redistricting. There’s no need for a computer program.
Or do you mean by state legislatures, that’s already what the most heavily gerrymandered states already use for redistricting. It would make no difference if they were simply “approving” a computer-generated district map (made with algorithms designed by whom?).
The computer program you suggest is entirely unnecessary and superfluous.
Peer-review by university professors of computer science. Since gerrymandering exists, a computer program is quite necessary.
Have you ever met a comp sci professor? They’re so cloistered, with no practical understanding of the world beyond the digital. They shouldn’t have anything to do with electoral reform.
Gerrymandering has already been solved in most states by utilizing independent redistricting commissions. Only the most backward states still give that task to their legislatures.
That’s what’s desired. Someone who isn’t interested in politics just whether a computer program is biased. All states would have to use the winning computer program.
So now you’re saying the federal government should impose this computer algorithm on the states? Don’t you realize the constitution explicitly gives electoral power to the states?
Your idea just gets worse and worse the more you try to defend it.
No, there are limits to state powers. Gerrymandering is essentially disenfranchising some voters.
You want more justices so they hear more cases, it’s like 80% of cases requesting supreme Court review never see the Supreme Court because they say they don’t have the time and their caseload is too high.
More justices won’t hear more cases since all the justices hear the same cases. It might be slower since more justices would now be asking questions.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/circuitAssignments.aspx
more justices would spread the circuit assignment load over a larger number, allowing more cases to be evaluated for the supreme court.
for example, alito is above the third and fifth circuits.
Good point but then the extra justices would have to be paid with taxpayer money, and more justices would be asking questions in cases before the entire court.
lol wtf
you really didn’t understand the assignment at all.
No you’d still have 9 hearing a case you’d just have sets. There’s no rule that says every justice has to hear every case. Staye courts already work this way.
Which computer program?
One of theany AIs? All run by Techo Libertarian jackhole conservarives?
The US government would have companies bid for the districting program. The winning bid would be peer-reviewed and required to be used by all states.
The courts are overloaded. Increasing the number a of all levels of judges would be a good idea in general.
Outvoting corrupt insane people on the supreme court is just a bonus.
Taxpayers would have to pay these additional judges. The selection process beyond Supreme Court justices could be for a bipartisan committee of scholars to select a set number of qualified individuals to be judge. One of these would be randomly chosen.
The salary for judges is an insignificant expense compared to e.g. the loss of revenue by the trump tax cuts.
The reason term limits aren’t good for the SC is because the constitution shouldn’t be something that changes with the political spectrum. It also prevents them from receiving being targeted or retaliated against for their decisions. It’s supposed to be hard for them to change and redefine the law. What they’re doing now is an abomination. There’s nothing wrong with the way the SC is set up. It’s filled with facists is the problem.
If SCOTUS is filled with fascists, then something is wrong. The reason for term limits is to remove justices who are making bad rulings.
What’s wrong is a literal fascist pedo filled the seats and the majority party approved it for political gain and power. The fix is cutting the head off the snake, not adding more snakes
All of the scotus rulings are reversible by passing more direct laws and amendments to the constitution.
Or limit the terms of SCOTUS justices in order to remove those who make bad rulings.