Americans are divided on major issues that the U.S. Supreme Court is due to rule on in the coming weeks, but most agree on one thing - neither Republicans nor Democrats see the nation’s top judicial body as politically neutral, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Just 20% of respondents to the poll agreed that the Supreme Court is politically neutral while 58% disagreed and the rest either said they did not know or did not respond. Among people who described themselves as Democrats, only 10% agreed it was politically neutral and 74% disagreed, while among Republicans 29% agreed and 54% disagreed.
Because it’s fucking not…?
Fun fact: a full majority of Supreme Court justices were nominated by presidents who were inaugurated despite losing the popular vote!
The supreme court system as we know it needs to be replaced outright. I think that term and age limits (10 years, age 60), plus each state popularly electing 1 supreme justice to represent them, would be the right way to go. The president can elect a justice to represent their administration, who is replaced by the next president’s pick. Also, a ban on gifts of any shape. No more motorcoaches!
This would make it much harder for justices to become politically captured, or culturally out of touch.
One per state is not great. Like the senate, it will over-represent low population states and unless you include Puerto Rico it will be an even number.
We almost need a non-partisan judiciary oversight board that appoints supreme court justices and has the authority to remove them given concrete and well-defined rules to prevent them from acting against the public and judicial precedent.
I think what we should do is have a max age for appointment, and then phase one out every 2 years.
This gives an 18 year turnaround, and every president gets 2 nominations. The senate must follow confirmation hearings and cannot pull that shit Bitch McConnell did on Obama.
The most senior justice in the one that goes. Unless One dies early for some reason.
Also mandate ethics and oversight.
Of course you need Senate confirmations, before Trump elects some billionaire, Fox host or family member to the Supreme Court
Yes. But under this plan, they would be obligated to hold them.
Rejection is a valid response, but freezing them out so your guy can appoint a corrupt bastard is not.
Got it, that makes sense.
The supreme court was stacked specifically to help topple democracy, so how could anyone see that as politically neutral?
Not just stacked, BOUGHT. Most of the Conservatives are taking bribes openly.
Bribes are protected speech. Now move along, citizen.
HEY!!! The preferred term is donation, or gift.
Uh doy
I’ll take ‘stating the obvious’ for 2000 alex
Your judges, and not just the Supreme Court ones, are appointed by politicians. How can they not be partisan?
Canadian judges are all appointed by politicians and we don’t have half the partisan issues America does.
Still seems like a bad idea to me. I honestly don’t even know how they’re appointed here in Australia, because this shit never, ever comes up.
AUS is a commonwealth country like Canada. Your judges are appointed by the attorney general. Who in turn is appointed by your governor general (the king’s representative) but advised by your PM. Basically chosen by your PM as the 'ole GG is basically all pomp and circumstance only. A figurehead choosing not to use their actual power. Good faith and all that.
You have a new attorney general in 2025. You probably should check it out. It’s a system that relies on everyone acting in good faith and is quite political. The reason why it never comes up is because it hasn’t broken down yet.
Note: the GG is appointed by the king who has the ultimate decision making power but, good faith. He is also “advised” by the PM, by the way. Just to double down on your concerns.
The USA made it a long way without it being a serious issue, like 200 years. Like presidents would pick qualified federal court judges whose judicial philosophies tended to favor their side a bit more, but were generally good at being fair jurists, and cases decided along the lines of which party’s president had appointed them were super rare.
Then in the 80s, Reagan started appointing more explicitly partisan judges, and a far right activist think tank started grooming ideologues who were law students as potential future justices, a few of whom Trump ended up appointing. Basically every appointment after 1982 either continued the trend, or worsened it, with the notable exception of Obama appointing Marrick Garland, though he knew there was a good chance the Senate wouldn’t approve any nominee.
It’s one of those systems that works fine if everybody is acting in good faith, and crumbles when someone tries to take advantage of it. Yeah it’s probably a bad idea.
Any system that relies on everyone acting in good faith is flawed from the get go. You were just lucky until you weren’t.
That’s true, but it’s very hard to come up with a system that can’t be gamed. The fact that you’re not aware of Australia’s system works means it’s probably even more vulnerable to exploitation because nobody in Australia is paying attention.
Really, all political systems are based to some extent on people acting honourably and acting in the best interest of the country rather than themselves or their political party. Eventually that always breaks down.
The main reason I’m unaware is because I couldn’t be arsed looking it up when I posted that, but you make a good point. It’s concerning that our conservative party was trying the same culture war bullshit that worked so well in America, but heartening that we collectively told them to knock that shit off in the last election, although I’m not sure the lesson stuck.
Ironically enough, the only reason I know politicians appoint judges in Queensland, is because of a rather infamous appointment we had.
TIL. At least there was significant push-back over it.
That’s not true. Judges are elected in many states.
That’s not any better.
I am curious what you think should be done then. Appointment is no good. Elected is no good. Do we just draw random names from a hat? See who wanders up to the desk that day?
Merit based hiring/promotion like any other public servant seems more rational to me.
I feel like a Venn diagram of the people unsure if the Supreme Court is neutral or not, would be a perfectly overlapping circle of people that were unsure to vote Trump or Harris (Biden).
And 20% is an alarming number of people completely out of touch with the rest of the world, or even their own local communities.
completely out of touch with the rest of the world, or even their own local communities.
With the ketamine crisis, there’s a lot of people completely out of touch with the room they’re in.
Huh, no one is reporting on trump’s polling either.
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump
I can’t believe that ~45% are still favorable. Most depressing thing I’ve read in the past 10 minutes
Americans gonna American.
Negative unfavorable is pretty bad though. He’s always had his main base of 36%. Him sending in the National Guard and Marines to California may have moved that number a little down too. These are mostly months old polls.
If it doesn’t remove him from office or kill him it’s not bad enough.
No shit
The Tangerine Toddler added people he thought he could control to an already corrupt panel
Thomas, at a minimum, should be in prison
I love how anyone needed a poll for this.
A new poll indicates breathing may be very popular.
“Well I wanna hear what FOX News says first before I make up my mind about breathing…”
—MAGA
If you polled people on breathing you’d find 67 to 70% of people in favor of it and 30 to 33% claiming it isn’t American enough because too many foreigners are doing it.
They used to actually believe it was politically neutral, can you believe it? 😂
6th grade me thought the Supreme Court was the coolest branch of government. Objective, wise, and infallible.
We’re all just people I guess
Every now and then I think, “this is the perfect job for a computer some day.” Can’t be bribed. Can’t be threatened.
But, we keep seeing that algorithms and such are biased based on who makes it and/or the training data used. So, IDK. Nothing’s perfect.
