I constantly see that the current US Supreme Court makes inconstitucional rulings like for example, allowing racial profiling.
For what little I’ve gathered due to separation of powers. The supreme court is just a designated authority. Why hasn’t there been any movement that just aims to de-legitimize the current supreme Court?
Why can’t a judge say “I denounce the Supreme courts authority for their failing to uphold the spirit of the law and now I shall follow this other courts rulings”?
Well, that would be a constitutional crisis. And its what we’re heading for.
The thing is, once a case goes to the SC, its pretty much written in stone until they themselves overturn it. The Executive branch is beholden to its rulings so what they say is how the law gets handled. So if a, say, district judge makes one ruling, and the SC overtures it, the SC has the Executive branch make sure its enforced.
There aren’t really any ways to remove SC justices in the law. Thats exactly why we on the left have been raising concern about these appointees for so long.
There aren’t really any ways to remove SC justices in the law. Thats exactly why we on the left have been raising concern about these appointees for so long.
Well, they can hypothetically be impeached, but that’s unlikely to happen with the current Congress.
They can be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for criminal misconduct as well. When you have a judge like Thomas openly accepting bribes to influence his vote from the bench, he’s in direct violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Our liberal DOJ didn’t want to touch this under Biden or Obama or Clinton, because it would have angered the press.
But this was a political decision not a legal one.
We also have 2 justices that lied under oath. They said they wouldn’t touch precedent and were asked specifically about roe v wade and said they wouldn’t vote against it but they did. The supreme court is not valid in my opinion but what are we supposed to do about it?
Impeachment doesn’t seem to function in the modern political landscape
Impeachment is unlikely with any congress. It’s just not a sufficient method of accountability.
SCOTUS can be impeached. Unclear who would run the trial if you’re impeaching Roberts though.
Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett all need to be though.
Only one Supreme Court justice has been impeached, and even then they weren’t removed from office. You would need to have a judge do horrific things to get removed from office.
Like make up law, take bribes and shit on the constitution in favor of a goddamn fascist think tank‽
There aren’t any real standards right now obviously. I just personally think the ethical bar for impeachment shouldn’t be in hell though.
I don’t look at it from an ethical bar, but functional. The political conditions where impeachment is likely is rare.
Big difference between what should be and what is across a broad spectrum of things right now.
Impeachment trials are overseen by the Vice President except for when the President is being impeached.
Well, that would be a constitutional crisis.
We’ve been using the phrase “constitutional crisis” to explain a relationship between the three branches that boils down to “The President can do what he wants” since at least Reagan.
This isn’t a crisis. This is how the country has been governed for decades (if not centuries).
There aren’t really any ways to remove SC justices in the law.
The legal resolution to a broken court is to pack it with better judges and to prosecute corrupt officials as you find them.
Liberals refuse to do this. Ffs, they can’t even be bothered to bottle up a SC nomination a month before election day.
We have an outright fascist party and a controlled opposition. Until that changes, every well-meaning progressive is just taking another swing at Lucy’s football when they primary in another batch of Do Nothing Dems.
The Executive branch is beholden to its rulings
Though made significantly less potent by one such ruling that makes the president immune to punishment for any crime committed as an “official act”.
Their rulings are effectively “No one but the president is able to do X, Y, Z” because the president can always just do something they know is illegal, wait months/years for the court to finally hear the case, get told to stop, and then basically just keep doing the same thing a different way until it gets challenged again, which becomes another months/years long process.
I hate to bring it up, but the second amendment is a law.
And that’s the problem with the corruption we’re seeing. The poor of both left and right are seeing decisions favor the rich and powerful at the expense of what they believed were their rights. We need to correct the list of the ship of state before people start to work against it openly.
They’re part of the totally optional “checks and balances” we’ve depended on for 250 years or so. The Founders never thought the solution would become part of the problem, so there’s a limited number of options available. Impeachment is one, but the other part of the checks and balances is Congress, which has also become part of the problem.
Depending on voluntary compliance was a noble idea in the 1700s, but it should have been codified in the federal regulations.
The framers made the dangerous presumption that everyone would act in good faith even if they disagreed. I’m actually kind of surprised there weren’t more set-in-stone checks on power, given that they had just come out of a revolution where a not-insignificant proportion of the colonial population openly supported the occupying force.
Some of the founders (there were actually quite a lot of them, many with opposing views) did actually see that, and thought things should be changed every once in a while.
Unfortunately that would make it harder for power mongers to monger power. So there’s rarely been limits placed on power to any lasting degree.
The problem is the difficulty is intentional.
Part of the system of checks and balances is the Supreme Court is appointed for life so should be above the constant swing of politics or popular opinion.
In theory even today’s right wing court is ok (after four years) because they will remain regardless of what party is in power or clown is in the White House. It’ll be interesting to see what they do when politics swing back to sanity, however a non-fascist party resident won’t stretch the legal boundaries so maybe is irrelevant.
Given that positions on the court open up rarely and years apart, it generally stays relatively balanced. However this time around a combination of bad timing and political maneuvering made today’s court more partisan than ever. Violating the norm of requiring that they be competent means they no longer follow existing law or legal precepts
By definition, anything the SCOTUS rules is constitional. Typically, in the US, until a law defines or forbids something, it’s legal.
In cases like Roe v. Wade, there not a direct or clear law that says “abortion is legal.” It was a right to privacy that Roe leaned on, that a woman’s decision to get an abortion or not was covered as a privacy issue. Which is not an altogether permanent ruling over a longer time frame and a change in justices and a new case can change how the law is interpreted. The more permanent version would be a constitutional amendment that would be harder to undo, doesnt rely on the SCOTUS to interpret nuance, and is the result of a push by the American people to change a law.
Ultimately, the way to nullify a SCOTUS ruling is to make a more clear law that says “no, actually, we want this.”
No, the Constitution is constitutional. The Supreme Court does not have the authority to overturn the Constitution even if they engage in bad faith interpretations of it.
No, the SCOTUS interprets the laws for implementation. All SCOTUS can overturn is previous interpretations.
This SCOTUS has openly lied about what the constitution requires.
There’s a process within the law, and there’s a process where we replace the current law with something else. Within the law, we can vote for representatives who will impeach the current corrupt justices and approve new ones who are hopefully not corrupt. Let’s call that option A.
Option B is the total overthrow of the government, which is ridiculous to even consider, but it’s the alternative you’re hinting at. Denouncing the SCOTUS doesn’t change the ruling government in any way. Society is built on the idea that we all more or less agree to be ruled in exchange for fair rules and national defense. In a democracy, you have the appearance of agency, but you cannot simply withdraw consent to be ruled. The difference between democracy and fascism is that fascism explicitly defines violence as the means of control, while democracy merely implies that violence will be used to keep order. Once a democratically elected ruler decides to become fascist, there is no remedy but violence.
To wit, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.
That said, I do not think we’re quite there yet. I have no doubt Trump will try to go all in to remain in power, but I don’t think he actually has enough followers to pull it off.
But that still leaves the corrupt justices on the bench. We need to focus on elections for representatives willing to impeach corrupt justices. If you think that process is too slow, consider that a violent revolution would probably take decades of bloodshed, and there’s no guarantee we don’t get some other despot as a result. Violence is not the answer to this question.
Yeah, it’s just a farce now. There is no merit to their decisions. They are not passing laws, but political judgements.
Suppose a nation, rich and poor, high and low, ten millions in number, all assembled together; not more than one or two millions will have lands, houses, or any personal property; if we take into the account the women and children, or even if we leave them out of the question, a great majority of every nation is wholly destitute of property, except a small quantity of clothes, and a few trifles of other movables. Would Mr. Nedham be responsible that, if all were to be decided by a vote of the majority, the eight or nine millions who have no property, would not think of usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have? - John Adams
The US government is built around trying to put off dealing with the impossibility of a “democracy” swarming with slaves and incredibly rich aristocrats, so it needs unelected people whose job is to say no when people try to vote against the aristocrats. There might be liberals who don’t like the racial profiling, but that’s the price they pay to have a secretive council of lords who make it illegal for you to vote to make landlords illegal.
*We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. *
Within the confines of the Constitution, no.
If we realize en masse that this system is broken and there is no internal fix for it, then yes.
That would mean revolution or heavy reform, which I do not see at the horizon at all.
That can happen faster than you think. Nobody thought the USSR would be dissolved literally up to the minute that it did.
Yeah the thing about Revolution it is unpredictable. But the conditions are that Americans are not starving or going hungry yet, so they will not revolt I think.
Because the Supreme Court and it’s powers are defined in the Constitution itself, that’s not possible. They are the highest court in the country.
The modern Supreme Court has more power than was given to it by the Constitution. For example, their deciding the constitutionality of a law is not mentioned in the Constitution.
It was a big deal when the Supreme Court first did it. And they’ve been slowly giving themselves extra power making it more and more difficult to stop them.
Trump and the Supreme Court have violated the constitution
You are absolutely allowed to criticize the highest court in the land what are you are you even trying to say here?
You can criticize, but that does absolutely nothing. The citizens have no power over the Supreme Court and you can’t ignore their rulings.
They could but that would mean effort and sacrifice… so they won’t until it affects them directly and personally because “fuck you, got mine… why would I bother to help anyone other than myself?!”
The problem is that separation of powers is broken as trump has been able to capture the legislative and judicial branches at least such that they will not challenge him. So checks and balances are currently out the window. You have a good point that the only check left at this point is state vs federal but it is a very dangerous situation as essentially it brings us very close to a civil war situation. The next election will be crucial to the survival of the american system. Without a massive change to allow for a reboot of the system its likely to crash.
The fact that Obama didn’t fill the position that Scalia opened when he died is probably one of the biggest missed opportunities in America’s recent history. Had his position been filled with a left-leaning Justice, especially a young one with many decades of life left, much of America’s Fascist changes could have been opposed.
As it is, the SC has become a rubber stamp for whatever the current Fascist/Authoritarianist regime wants.
The fact that Obama didn’t fill the position that Scalia opened when he died is probably one of the biggest missed opportunities in America’s recent history
Blaming that on Obama is a real bullshit take on reality. Like it was one of the biggest stories in 2016 and hugely factored in the campaign rhetoric for every federal office. I have a hard time giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re genuinely unaware why the seat wasn’t filled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_nomination
I did not take rekabis’s comment to be blaming obama but just that it did not happen. I mean I saw it like you did for a second but at the end of reading it I doubt somone who blamed obama would not highlight it more. I think just because he did not point out how obama was robbed of it made one jump to it being some kind of accusation.
Based on their reply, I think they’re definitely blaming Obama for it.
yeah nevermind. I try my best to assume good faith when I see things, but im definitely wrong here.
Everything in the link you provided says that Obama could have done a shitton more to ensure that the Senate Judiciary Committee actually did their jobs.
Instead, they played political bullshit, Obama blinked, and as a result, America is now two good shakes away from a Fascist dictatorship. The midterm elections - or America’s own “Night of the Long Knives”, which seems all the more likely due to the rhetoric surrounding Kirk’s assassination - Will cinch this future in the bag.
Everything in the link you provided says that Obama could have done a shitton more to ensure that the Senate Judiciary Committee actually did their jobs.
Uh … I’m seeing a whole lot of letters being written urging the senate to perform their expected duty. Not seeing anything actually proposing actions Obama could have done other than withdraw Garland and nominate someone else. But why would he have when the Republicans told Obama point blank that they would not hold any hearings or votes for any candidate and they followed through for all judicial appointments (not just SCOTUS, there were like 70 federal judges nominated in 2016, and over 100 empty seats at the end of his presidency) unless Hillary won so she couldn’t nominate someone more liberal) and Garland was already a name that the Republicans had name-dropped themselves as a reasonable nominee and they stonewalled him anyways. Maybe you could direct link to the parts of the article that say what specific legal avenues Obama had available to force the Republican committee to advance the nominee and McConnell to hold a floor vote. Something that 29 Democratic state attorneys general and the 194-strong Democractic House Representatives and 44 Democratic US Senators all overlooked.
America is now two good shakes away from a Fascist dictatorship. The midterm elections - or America’s own “Night of the Long Knives”, which seems all the more likely due to the rhetoric surrounding Kirk’s assassination - Will cinch this future in the bag.
Don’t disagree with you at all on any of this. But it’s decidedly not Obama’s fault that the SCOTUS seat went
For what little I’ve gathered due to separation of powers. The supreme court is just a designated authority. Why hasn’t there been any movement that just aims to de-legitimize the current supreme Court?
Wait, what? Can you explain a bit more? Like what laws are you looking at, and are they less than 200 years old?
At least in practice, the Supreme Court is as strong as any other American institution. Which, to be fair, is saying less and less, but the faction with all the initiative right now is not the one against racial profiling.
LOL no.
