Yes, it’s such a weak system, there have been so many bad actors, and they’ve all done what Trump has each and every year for nearly 250 of them.
Still waiting for the specific weaknesses to be described. No, the fact that a President is packing the court isn’t a hole — Presidents have been doing it forever, as anyone who had read a single book on the USC would know — and somehow society didn’t collapse.
More than that, I’m still waiting for the many PhD-in-political-science geniuses who post here to give us detailed, specific solutions for fixing these problems, and especially tell us all how easy it would be to legislate said fixes.
It’s like the moaning on the match day thread for all the better-than-Peps there.
I’ve not been in a position to respond substantively since our exchange on Sunday morning, as I had a full on day today that I needed to prep for extensively yesterday but I’ll (briefly) try to here.
We can get caught up in semantics around the exact meanings of words and the distinction between the constitution and the institutions that are meant to support it, but whatever the rights and wrongs about that, it seems clear to me that your system of government, legislation and justice are simply not working as they once were.
I think part of this problem is the slavish adherence to a document of a quarter of a millennium’s antiquity, and the fact it was consciously structured in a way that is resistant to change. The number of substantive amendments in the last century strongly supports that assertion.
For lots of reasons I disagree with your assertion that the Executive’s influence over the Supreme Court isn’t a worthwhile point to advance. It may have been abused in the past, but never has it shown as much bias towards a particular politician, and not since the 1860s has American society been as divided, so the circumstances have manifestly changed. And that’s the rub with a system of power that is inimical to change - eventually circumstances will evolve to render it to be less effective, and ultimately, ineffective.
So whilst I’ll agree with your analysis that the bad faith actors are the clear and present danger right now, the system under which they operate has acted as an enabler to them imo.
As to what to do, I don’t have any specific answers and I don’t believe I ever claimed to. Judicial appointments being principally overseen by the judiciary (as in the UK) isn’t going to fly, so I certainly don’t have a magic wand, but I would suggest a wider and sensible look at the holy cow that is the constitution with a view to making fundamental changes to the way it is structured and operates would be a start, but I fear that debate will always be avoided because it’s so taboo.
What I do know is that there is a real prospect that a man who tried to overturn an election, who is plainly mentally and morally unfit for office, could be elected President again (with a minority vote) in a couple of weeks, following which he will undoubtedly use the Judges he appointed to subvert justice, and the nation will descend even further into rancour and division. Surely the Constitution was framed to avoid scenarios like this, and on that basis it’s plainly no longer working.
