Lago, you clearly have little to no idea about how the US Federal Courts system works, nor the history of the Supreme Court, nor why your idea is absolutely terrible.Lago PARANOIA wrote:Thanks for picking through an inconsequential statement in order to try to discredit my overall point Maj--are you really trying to claim because I used bad wording that I mean something the opposite of my clarification?Maj wrote:You said this:
In order to make things absolutely clear, the current process to put someone in the Supreme Court is fine in my opinion. The executive and legislative branch should have their thumbs in the pie.
I do, too, but the fact that they have lifetime tenure is horseshit. People do change and not everyone is behind the times, but having lifetime tenure drastically increases the chances of having someone with political viewpoints that just doesn't reflect the country's. This wasn't a problem back in the bad old days because society changed so slow, but it is a problem nowadays.Maj wrote: They may not make every judgment the way I want them to, but I do believe that they are a rational, functioning, and necessary part of our government.
Here's the truth: Getting a Supreme Court nominee confirmed is a big deal. Not just because they have lifetime appointments (all Article III federal judges do, for that matter) but because the Senate are a bunch of douchebags who don't have the slightest idea wtf a Supreme Court Justice actually does, so they focus on bullshit issues that collectively cover maybe 1/200th of the cases the Court hears. It usually takes about 3-6 months to get through this entire process, and that assumes the nominee is confirmed. If they had to do that 9 times every 8 years, you'd have the Senate spending more time confirming Supreme Court nominations than everything else they do. And you'd make the already insane wait time for other federal judges even longer. Currently, the lower courts are understaffed as it is, because Senators from both parties sit on nominations hoping to last long enough to get their guy into the Presidency.
Beyond that, you really would run out of people who can get confirmed pretty fast. People qualified to be Federal judges tend to make 10 times more in the private sector and the lower Federal courts suffer for it because the Supreme Court is the only one considered prestigious to be worth the gigantic pay cut.
Lifetime appointments mean they are beholden to no one. That's the whole point of an independent judiciary. Congress cannot reduce their pay, and the only three ways to get rid of them are death, retirement, and impeachment (which hasn't happened in over 200 years). State court judges are often elected, or serve terms or can be impeached by ballot initiatives. Those systems tend to suck, hard. Elected judges are essentially corrupt from the get-go since they are beholden to the people who got them elected (which is usually whatever wealthy corporation needs a ruling in their favor), those who serve terms, depending on the length of the term, are either okay, or create a revolving door that makes the State Supreme Court grossly unstable. And being able to easily remove judges leads to the exact tyranny of the majority that the judicial branch is there to prevent.
On top of that, the Supreme Court as it exists to day is one of the least radical, and least radically different than the population as a whole in the history of the United States (It is, in fact, the most trusted entity in the Federal Government by the population as a whole by a wide margin). The court when FDR came into office, for example, was so far off of the country's general viewpoint that one of the Justices had to change his entire judicial philosophy to keep the court at 9 Justices. One of the issues Nixon ran on in 1968 was impeaching Chief Justice Earl Warren, essentially for telling the cops that, yeah, people have rights that you have to respect.
By the way, the most liberal judge in the history of the Supreme Court (William Brennen) was appointed by Eisenhower.