Democratic Senators "Warn" SCOTUS

[*PhilHos*]

(08-14-2019, 02:14 PM)Crazyjdawg Wrote: I dislike the coin flip of who happens to be President when a court justice, one of the few lifetime appointments in our country's government, happens to die or retire makes for some really uncomfortable discussions like "RBG can't retire or die until we have a Democrat in the Oval Office" or, even worse, "I hope RBG dies or retires while there's a Republican in the Oval Office" and similar discussions.

The politicization of the Judicial branch is pretty unavoidable at this point, with freedoms such as abortion and gun rights being hotly debated topics that judges will inevitably have an opinion on, should a case ever reach their courtroom.

I don't know what this warning specifically threatens, but I don't think reform to the supreme court's make up is necessarily a horrifying thing. Term limits are something I've been hoping they'd add to Congress seats for a while now. Adding them to Supreme Court chairs wouldn't be the worst thing either.

Now, I understand talk like this is very threatening to constitutionalists (if that's what you'd like to call them), but I've never had the opinion that the Founding Fathers were infallible or specifically insightful enough to foresee problems that may occur 300 years into the future. So reform to long standing practices in our government isn't all that scary to me, as long as they are reasonable and logical. And applying term limits to a courtroom that handles the most high profile cases in our country doesn't seem unreasonable or illogical to me.

As for packing the courts, I don't see the point and I think it adds an unnecessary amount of bias in its own right. There's no reason to add more justices. Just have them set on terms is fine with me.

I feel the same way. I hate how political the Supreme Court has become and I can't think of a way we can make it less so. If we made it an elected office, it would be even more political.

Besides term limits (which I, too am in favor of), what other reforms can be made that will restrict the politicization of the Supreme Court?