Yes, Congress has the power to change the Supreme Court. The lifetime appointments of those justices do not have to doom the nation to a lifetime of their interpretations and rulings. So says the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
In the wake of the court’s Callai decision, which seriously weakened the Voting Rights Act, the BC says:
… Congress should pass a statute adopting 18-year term limits for active service on the Supreme Court. Under this system, justices would rotate into other judicial roles after 18 years, creating one vacancy for each president to fill every two years. This would strengthen the Court’s democratic accountability and enhance its connection with public values while respecting judicial independence. It is already reflected in bills pending in Congress, including the TERM Act.
Or, to quote the May 29 issue of The Insider, the BC’s newsletter:
Cleaning Up the Supreme Court’s Mess Congress has the power — and the responsibility — to mitigate the harm caused by Callais and prior Supreme Court decisions undermining voting rights. The Brennan Center lays out three immediate solutions: Ban partisan gerrymandering, strengthen voting rights protections, and reform the Supreme Court.
The obvious problem is that Congress must act. Not the Court, not the President. Congress. Something to consider if you’ve not yet voted in your state’s primary … and to keep in mind when you vote in November.
Then again, the National Constitution Center has noted that, of course, the Supreme Court has the power of judicial review, and it can determine that a law passed by Congress is unconstitutional.
Of course.
All of which takes us back to having to amend the Constitution.
… sigh …
Front row, left to right: Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Associate Justice Elena Kagan.
Back row, left to right: Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Credit: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
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Featured image: The Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC
SCOTUS has been my personal bugbear from, as you Yanks say, the get-go. The very thought of the nation’s ultimate judicial authority’s being so utterly corrupt is one that makes me scream silently in unlikely places.
How well I know that feeling. But it’s the lifetime appointments that get me. You can kick a corrupt official out of office. These justices are appointed for life!
I would like to see this, but I doubt congress would do it.
Certainly the current Congress wouldn’t do it. That’s why I mentioned the elections. A Democratic Congress might do it.
or add to them or do both
Congress can add more justices, perhaps to even things out, but the President has to sign the act, and you know he wouldn’t sign anything that diminishes his control of the court. And I haven’t noticed Congress doing much to buck Trump except for refusing to fund ICE until certain changes are made (no masks, body cams, judicial warrants). And for that I heartily applaud them, even if it did screw things up at the airports.
It is clear that something needs to be done. I have been absolutely shocked by some of the rulings lately, and they are very hard to defend if you look at the legal arguments and precedence. The partisan corruption flags are definitely flying for some of the court members.
Then there is congress. They aren’t even trying to do the jobs that they were elected to do. I’m starting to think that they are so detached from reality and within a bubble of self-reinforcing nonsense that there is no hope they will exert their constitutional powers and fulfill their obligations.
Vote, my good people, VOTE!!!
That’s one reason I’m so concerned about Michael Bennet leaving the Senate to run for Governor. Sure he’d make a good governor, but wouldn’t he be more useful in the Senate? I go round and round with that, figuring he knows what he’s doing, but for governor, I think Weiser would do just as well while keeping Bennet in the Senate.
But maybe Bennet is getting out precisely because the Senate is just rolling over and playing dead, making no effort to stop Trump.
Yes, we must VOTE!! We must turn Congress BLUE! We must stop Trump.
I was talking with friends lately, and one, a retired master sergeant, kept saying that “someone needs to do something.” I finally asked her… who? Her eyes went really big as she realized that the only people who can change this now is…US! All of us! If the elections are derailed, I do think that people will take to the streets.
That’s about all we’ll have left if the elections get screwed up. As I understand it, Bennet isn’t the only “good guy” to get fed up and leave the Senate. If the ones in positions to do something to stop the madness won’t do it, what will we be left with? Trump and MAGA are doing everything they can to screw up the elections. Even Gov. Polis knuckled under and let Tina Peters out of prison. I am a very unhappy camper these days.
I hear you.
The damage the nine can do is only limited by the imagination. For example, who would have thought they would give companies the same legal rights as people?
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, IMHO, we are in the mess we’re in now because of the court’s Citizens United decision. A travesty that allowed the nation’s wealthy (people, corporations, PACs) to buy whatever people, influence, judges, and votes they want.
I agree with you, but Fox News has a lot of accountability here too!
Ugh, don’t get me started on Fox News! (Of course, maybe I’m not being fair because I haven’t spent a scintilla of my time watching them.) Would it help if I said Pete Hegseth makes me physically ill?
Okay, that does help a little. I was stuck at the car dealership for a couple of hours, forced to listen to NewsMax. Holy Smokes, what a biases load of crap that was. They talked about the huge disaster being caused by… wait for it… Obamacare the whole time. People getting their news from those sources are shoveled a pack of biased propaganda. I hunted online to fine any credible information to back up what they were saying, and it just didn’t add up.
Hey, those people get their news from a news outlet, not social media, so it must be true.
I get so tired of Trump blaming everything bad on a previous administration because of course his can do no wrong.
Citizens United was a travesty, so are ‘lifetime appointments’ to a Court. Supreme Court Justices, in Canada, age out at 75-years old and can be fired for “misconduct” if both Parliament and the Senate both agree, or through an investigation by the ‘Canadian Judicial Council’ — a 44-member group “under the chairmanship of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada”, if found guilty of misconduct then the Minister of Justice can remove them. This almost happened to Canadian SC Justice Russell Brown, who resigned in 2013 as he was about to be removed over a drunken incident while on vacation in Arizona. Accepting gifts from Harlan Crow, for example, would obviously be grounds for dismissal.
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/ccs-ajc/05.html
Our Constitution provides for the removal of Supreme Court Justices for treason, bribery, or some other serious things. But I don’t recall that it’s ever been done. No doubt for partisan political reasons. Trump’s got a majority of his justices on the bench now and you’d have to buck him to get rid of any of them. Washington is so broken …