Approval ratings mean nothing to lifetime appointments. Nobody should hold a position forever. If they wanna keep them there for life, then at least make them subject to review every X years
Theres only one way to end a lifetime appointment, so they should worry if it gets too low.
Oui
You can impeach them or imprison them too. They only hold their position "in good behavior".
Given that Thomas is clearly accepting bribes and his wife is using him to further a coup, I think we can safely assume that means nothing, other than a future weapon against a liberal justice.
If you get one in prison then I'm pretty sure they'll get kicked out. Now we just need a Congress with the balls to spend 5 pages defining bribery so the justices can't wiggle out of it.
How do imprison someone who has the money, connections, and legal knowledge to appeal the case all the way up to themselves.
I wonder what the plantation owners approval ratings were like. We should conduct a study.
3/5ths of people disapproved
My wife and I love each other endlessly and agreed to the whole "until death" thing, but we both hold a firm belief that marriage contracts should have an expiration date at which point the couple can step back and evaluate if they want to continue this union. If not, marriage dissolved, bye.
I hear people say that X isn't marriage, but I say that nothing should be marriage and EVERYTHING should have a planned expiration date. Except light bulbs, batteries, and puppies.
We really need to get these guys out of the office. Why are we caring about impeaching presidents, we need to keep a close eye, catch them doing illegal shit and impeach the supreme court justices. Obviously hold off until the US has a president that can appoint good, fair judges - I don't believe Trump is capable of that, and Biden is at best borderline capable.
There is supposed to be a separation between the 3 governmental branches within the US. Unfortunately, that’s just not reality. Judges should be elected to terms by the people. We are meant to have a government of the people, by the people, for the people. We the people, are the most important pieces of this equation.
We the people, need to push our agenda on the government instead of the government pushing itself on us.
I’m not talking about any sovereign citizen craziness. I’m just saying it’s 2024, I can pay for my groceries with my cellphone why can’t I chose how my tax dollars are spent?!
It surely does mean something. They don't have an army to enforce their rulings. They also can get a whole bunch of new judges in. Finally, if a prosecutor gets their shit together they could end up in prison for bribery. And while they can define bribery however they want, see point one.
Go figure. Three of them are Trump-appointed shills, two are ~~Cheney's~~ Dubya's and Thomas hanging on from "Vision Thing" Bush times.
We are rapidly approaching the point where it is an open question as to whether the Supreme Court can make its rulings stick in jurisdictions that don't fall along the current majority's ideological bent, and that's not a place anybody in their right mind wants to go. The question is, are Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett still possessed of enough self-awareness to recognize that and rule accordingly at least some of the time? If not, do Roberts and Gorsuch make a consistent enough voting bloc to swing dicey decisions away from the foaming-at-the-mouth radical right wing of the bench when they might seriously endanger the ongoing credibility of the court as an institution? I'm not super optimistic, but time will tell...
We are rapidly approaching the point where it is an open question as to whether the Supreme Court can make its rulings stick in jurisdictions that don’t fall along the current majority’s ideological bent
Recently the most significant refusals to follow court rulings are in jurisdictions that do agree with the court majority's ideological bent. Alabama's voting maps fight and Texas's current border fight being the two biggest ones. At least for now democrats still generally believe in the American system and respect the rule of law.
The governors of solidly blue states will soon enough have citizens who are going to not put up with it.
They can try and fail to make a nationwide abortion ban stick on the west coast.
West coast had an interstate compact during COVID because they knew they could not count on the Feds.
Hawaii over there with the sunglasses on.
How lame is the concept of "lifetime appointees"?
There’s a reason for it. We may have made the need for it meaningless, but the reasoning is sound.
The functional part (avoiding incentivizing corruption) could be handled just as well by giving them lifelong pay (and financial reporting). The winds of justice being determined by when an old person dies is not a necessary feature.
They could also be limited to serving for say 10 years without the possibility of a second term. Effectively very similar to a lifetime appointment. There's no re-election so they don't have to rule on cases in a political manner. This doesn't solve the problem of approval rating being completely meaningless, but at least there's some limit on insanity.
It wasn’t, really. We need to stop attributing some kind of infinite foresight and wisdom to the authors of the constitution. The Supreme Court was a bad idea poorly implemented, the senate as the superior house was a fucking terrible idea, and the independent executive is not defensible at this point.
The authors (who, let’s remember, were working with a 17th century philosophy on the nature of humankind that has since been discredited) were operating on entirely different premises, for an entirely different country, and balancing things like slavery and freedom and democracy versus rule by the elite (the elite were justified to rule by their identity as being elites) by trying to come to a middle ground compromise on those and related issues. It’s really kind of crap by modern democratic, political, and philosophical standards. The only reason it hasn’t been addressed is that we’ve become self-aware enough that we’re terrified that US democracy has fallen to the point that we could only do worse than 18th century slaveholders, landlords, and wealthy lawyers.
To make it explicit, the authors thought that a) the rich would put the country’s interests ahead of their own, b) that selfishness would mean people wanted to protect their branch of government rather than their party, and c) that part b would be a sufficient bulwark against demagoguery. They believed in a world where men (and I mean men, specifically, and rich men in particular) were rational actors who would act in their own self-interest.
Don’t get me wrong - they were reading the scholars of their time - but if political and social science hasn’t made advances in the past three centuries we should probably just give it up.
I can't believe it's that high.
So it's the lowest yet but it was lower in July 2022? Which is it? Did a fucking robot write this?
The Supreme Court's approval rating has plunged to one of its lowest levels yet...
Emphasis mine, ofc. I don't disagree that it's worded awkwardly.. I was wondering the same thing as you until I reread it several times. ¯\(°_o)/¯
I overreacted, I've been super paranoid about automation enshitifying every aspect of online culture and media lately.
Well, yeah half the court was appointed through nebulous means, and they've been slowly throwing out things considered settled law that's been on the books for literal decades. No shit that people have no faith in the legitimacy of the court anymore.
At this point I think we should ignore any and all rulings they make until we fix the system that brought this bullshit on.
When five out of nine have been appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, that's what you'll get.
Of course, we have no way of removing any of them, so it's not like they have to care.
There are ways. Impeachment being the constitutionally sanctioned way.
I hate that the rule of law is being eroded and vanishing before my eyes by these people, like Abbott and similar ilk, but...it is hard to yourself stick to the rule of law, when the other will not. It almost becomes meaningless, ink on a piece of paper and nothing more.
I cannot think of good alternatives, when things reach that stage. I just hope we still have a way to turn back from all of this. I want to believe the train tracks we're on still fork off in a different direction, somewhere along the line before we slam into the wall at 80MPH.
The eradication of the rule of law is one of the most dangerous things I think a modern society can have happen. I have ideas about where that goes, and it's some pretty fucking dark places I'd rather we as a nation would not.
There's ways. They're only lifetime appointments, after all.
Unfortunately, they could have a 0% approval rating and we'd still never get the 2/3rds majority in congress to do fuckall about it. This supreme court will continue to pander to corporate and donor interests and act wholly without ethics because our system was built on the concept that people in those roles would act with integrity and utterly falls apart when people on the supreme court flagrantly disregard their responsibility to citizens and act in their own interests.
Biden et al should have packed the court when they had the chance.
Can't say I disagree. When you fight a cheater by playing 100% by the rules in a world where cheating isn't punished, you lose every time. This pretty much sums up the last 40 years of the Democratic party.
Don’t forget the idiocy of playing as center-right as possible by running the most milquetoast candidates possible. Every time. Still, actually.
American politics is corrupt from top to bottom
They are all in someone’s pocket. How can we approve of them. They make horrible decisions as of late.
But unfortunately, it means nothing to them since they don’t have to be elected
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