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Is packing the Supreme Court a way to subvert the Democratic process?
12 Answers
- ?Lv 52 weeks agoFavourite answer
That would appear to be the intent of the Democrats.
Instead of being Law Givers they are attempting to make the Court a political office of the Government.
I doubt they will have much luck with that.
- dain978Lv 61 week ago
It's already packed. Originally it was only 6 judges on the Supreme Court. So can someone tell me how it got to nine without someone adding more.
- rev rickyLv 62 weeks ago
That's what Mitch McConnell did when he refused to a vote on Merrick Garland.
- Anonymous2 weeks ago
In fact, the impulse behind it is just the opposite.
With the exception of Clarence Thomas, every Justice on the Supreme Court has been appointed since 1992. In that time period, Democrats have won the popular vote in every single Presidential election except for 2004. So you'd expect the majority of Justices to be Democrat appointed, as the American people wanted. But that's not the case. The majority have been appointed by Republicans. In fact, we now have a 6-3 conservative majority. This is a subversion of the democratic process. Republicans haven't been winning elections, not in democratic terms anyway. And yet they've used anti-democratic processes like the Electoral College, and measures such as stealing a nomination from Barack Obama, to fundamentally alter the court in ways which go against the wishes of the majority of Americans, as expressed at the ballot box in the last eight elections. It's also anti-democratic in that it promises to cut against the future wishes of the American people. That's because this Republican appointed court majority, manufactured in contravention of the democratically expressed will of the American people, is likely to endure for some time. That's because the Republican appointed Justices are comparatively young. With the exception of Clarence Thomas, who is 71, and Samuel Alito, who is 71, the conservative wing of the court is all in their sixties or lower. In fact, three out of the five court members are under 60. Amy Coney Barrett, the newest Justice on the court, is just 49. Given the longevity of some other Justices, she could be serving on the court past mid century. Even John Roberts, who is 66, could easily serve another fifteen or twenty years. The three youngest members of the conservative wing are all younger than the youngest member of the liberal wing (Justice Elena Kagan, who is 60). This all means that their influence will be extending decades into the future. Which is significant because there's no reason to expect that the American people will suddenly start voting for Republicans en masse. In the last twelve years no Republican has come within three million votes of a Democratic candidate for President. The Republicans continue to get virtually all of their support from white people and the US is going to become less and less white over the coming years. The GOP also gets their strongest support from Baby Boomers, a demographic group which is dying out. Meanwhile, Millennials, who voted against Republicans by a two to one margin in the last elections, are now the biggest age group in the electorate. All of this promises a future where Democrats may continue to win large majorities in Presidential elections, but the court may still stay conservative, and because many of the justices on the court have been appointed in the last decade, it may embody a form of conservatism which is particularly out of touch with the America of the future. Republican leaders recognize all this. It's why they've been so desperate to pack the courts with as many conservative judges as they can. Savvy Republican politicians like Mitch McConnell realize that their party is increasingly unlikely to win elections in the future. So if they want to have conservative ideas still controlling government then they need to circumvent democracy and install unelected, unaccountable, judges with lifetime appointments who will be able to make sure that conservative ideas keep their power over government once the American people start rejecting Republican politicians at the ballot box.
So the impulse to pack the court isn't an anti-democratic one. It's a pro-democracy impulse (which isn't to say that it's necessarily the right avenue). The idea is to make the court more representative of the actual will of the people over the last several years.
- Anonymous2 weeks ago
I guess Trump supporting three incoming ultra conservative justices doesn’t count, right?