Doug64 wrote:@Steve_American, would you define as “moderate” a judge that believes laws and constitutions should be applied as intended by those that created them, except when modified by later legislatures and voters?
You added this part there, "... except when modified by later legislatures and voters".
This is wide open to interpretation. If you mean only through the specified process, then, no I do not believe that. If you mean that any law passed is an infallible guide to what the Constitution says, then again, no I think that goes too far the other way.
. . . What I believe is that moderate justices are far more likely to get it right than either justices of the right or the left.
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Steve_American wrote:
UM,
IMHO, it is not 'undemocratic' to fix a problem that 60% to 75 % of the people polled say they do NOT want to see created.
Unthinking Majority wrote:I think this is probably nonsense.
Also, Americans elected a conservative Senate and a conservative President. Dear America, If you don't want a conservative-leaning supreme court, don't elect conservatives.
You do know that Trump did not get a majority or even a plurality of the votes.
Also, by design of the Founders, the Senate does not represent the majority of the voters at this time. At this time, the Repuds in the Senate represent way less than half the voters. This was by design. However, the founders did not intend for there to be political parties and surely they didn't intend there to be a few billionaires who can spend $20 million to destroy any Senator they choose to destroy.
. . . Citizens United has done what many said it would do. It lets the Chinese Peoples Army spend money to buy TV ads to damage the American election process. It lets billionaires threaten to remove any Repud Senator who displeases them.
. . . Also, the Founders could not have imagined the world we live in now. They could not have *even* imagined that the diesel engine would allow about 5% of the population to feed the other 95% (I think these are about the right percentages). Therefore, they could not have imagined metro-areas with a pop. of over 10 million. They assumed that the pop. would always be living mostly on the land farming it. Therefore, they did not have foreseen that giving every state 2 Senators would lead to our current situation.
So, I reject your claim that it is "probably nonsense" for me to claim that a solid majority of voters and the vast majority of the Americans do not want the Repuds to ram through this last USSC justice after some of them had started voting. If RBG has died on Nov. 4th (afrer the election), what do you think the American people would think if the Repuds rammed through their pick in a lame-duck session? IMHO, in that case they would have done so.
Steve_American wrote:
And, I said to add Justices who are 'moderates' as well as some left leaning.
I think the vast majority of Americans want a USSC that is fair and looks at each case on its own merits. I also, think that a majority agree that the Constitution should evolve, that it is a living document. I think I have seen cases resolved by votes of all the right-wing justices that did exactly that.
Unthinking Majority wrote:Why wasn't this a problem for you, and many other, before left-leaning RBG died? It's because you don't want a right-leaning supreme court, but you have little issue with a left-leaning supreme court. Ideally i'm sure you'd prefer an objective supreme court (moderate, shall we say), but it's only a problem now apparently. Hypocrisy.
Honestly i don't want a conservative supreme court either, but I also don't think the supreme court should change just because it starts to lean to the ideology some people don't like.
UM, I did suggest this in the past. I think I suggested something similar here even.
You just forgot about it or didn't see it.
Ideally, we would have the system we had when I was in HS and college. But, with all Federal elections funded by the Fed. Treasury. No, campaign contributions at all. And political parties which are like we had then, i.e., not crazy. And with the filibuster in place to make the nominees for justices and judges be somewhat moderate. [I don't know how to do it in the current political climate, but I would like to see some way to force both parties to be reasonable about confirming justices and judges. For example, using the filibuster to block every choice by a President for years should not be allowed either. Maybe this, the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate the USSC, so have a law that if a party uses the filibuster without any support from 1 member of the other party to block a Justice, then the USSC is suspended and can not hear any cases or issue any more decisions until that seat is filled.]
As to when the size of the USSC should be changed, IMHO the time is now.
One party is crazy. It will soon have put 3 new justices on the court when it should have just put 1 on. It effectively reduced Obama's 2nd term to 3 years and extended Trump's term to 5 years. At least for choosing USSC justices, which is the topic here. . . . That party also made the American people suffer in order to block any
NEEDED thing that Obama proposed, thereby shortening his 2 terms to one year). The Repud party didn't care a wit about the deficit, which was one excuse they used. We all know that, because it had increased the deficit far more in both Bush's terms and in Trump's term with tax cuts for the wealthy that didn't trickle down and just made them insanely more wealthy. Therefore, I deduce that the Repud party doesn't care a wit about the welfare of the American people. Some might think that because the Constitution says the Gov. is to "promote the GENERAL welfare", that the US Gov. has a Constitutional duty to do exactly that. And, the Repuds didn't do that after the GFC/2008 or at any later time for that matter.
So, yes, IMHO, now is high time to start playing hardball politics. Very hardball politics.!
But then, I believe the UN IPCC report from a few years ago that we had 12 years to get to zero CO
2 emissions, so we don't have time to wait years or decades to get this fixed.
OTHO, I believe in MMT, so I want the Gov. of the world to set up a Job Guarantee Program, Fed. funded and locally run, that in America would pay everyone who wants a job to be paid over $20/hr. to do such a job (of their choice, within reason).
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- By Rich
- By JohnRawls
- By Dr House