You're reading the Prompt 2024 newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox.
Two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats have an opportunity to debate ways to reform the court, such as limiting justices' term limits or expanding its seat on the bench. Since Biden has not supported any of these proposals, I asked my Post Opinion colleagues Megan McArdle and Ruth Marcus: What's going on?
Alexi McCammond: Republican candidates have long used the Supreme Court as an issue. Should President Biden embrace some (any!) court reform before the 2024 election?
Ruth Marcus: It might be politically wise for Biden to embrace something, but I'm not sure it will happen. I'm a big supporter of term limits for judges, but this would probably, but not certainly, require a constitutional amendment.
Alexi: The good news is that campaign promises can (sometimes) be made without a realistic plan to deliver on them, and I think this is one of those elections. It would be politically advantageous not only for Biden, but also for the lower-ranking Democratic Senate candidates.
Megan McArdle: The obvious problem with court reform is that most people care about it solely for partisan or ideological reasons. Of course, there are exceptions, like Ruth.
Ruth: Frankly, I am against expanding the court. That would make the biggest immediate difference. The political problem for the president is that he doesn't support the measure, but his allies on the left do.
Alexi: Why are you against expanding the courts? I'm intrigued by the idea and I'm like, “Let's see what happens.”
Ruth: I think it would be destroying the village in order to save it. It would set off a cycle of retaliatory expansion, permanently weakening the institution. “Let's see what happens” seems, with all due respect, too flippant an approach to this serious problem.
Alexi: I regret that the Trump era has led to a careless and sometimes non-serious attitude towards serious matters. 🙁
Luce: I think we have to ask ourselves, what problem are we trying to solve here? Is it because we (or Biden and the Democrats) don't like the Supreme Court's decisions? Or is it because we're concerned about the ethical behavior of the justices? Each of these calls for a different solution, and neither is easy. In the Luceverse, we address two problems with the Supreme Court: strengthening ethics rules and enforcement, and fixing the really fundamental structural problem of a Supreme Court whose membership is determined by chance when justices retire.
Ruth: If every president was guaranteed two justices (like term limits do), the Supreme Court would automatically be more in line with the public's opinion, which would be an improvement. If I were Biden, I would push for term limits legislation and see how it goes.
Megan: The ethical questions themselves are the product of a coordinated campaign to delegitimize conservative judges. No one raised an eyebrow when Ruth Bader Ginsburg accepted lavish trips to Israel or publicly criticized Donald Trump. We don't know what secrets lurk in the closets of Democratic-appointed judges because no one has put as much effort into investigating them. Yet.
Ruth: I really have to disagree with Meghan on that point.
Ruth: I have no doubt that some of the justices have tried to undermine the decision through ethical lapses on the part of the conservative justices. I also acknowledge that there were lapses and questionable behavior on the part of the liberal justices. I think that Justice Ginsburg was extremely unwise in her criticism of Trump, and I said so at the time. She apologized for that, but that goes beyond what the conservative justices did.
Megan: Again, Ruth, you are an honorable exception, but I think for most people this is tactical, so bear with me.
Ruth: It is also true that, to my knowledge, no liberal justice has shown a willingness to accept the kind of large donations that Justice Clarence Thomas and, to a much lesser extent, Justice Samuel Alito have received. Some of Justice Thomas' gifts, including paying for his nephew's grandson's tuition and forgiving the mortgage on a luxury motor coach, are so egregious that I, and many others, believe they have nothing to do with his ideology.
Megan: I think the courts should have stricter ethics rules, but I don't think this influenced Thomas' decision.
Alexi: How do you understand or explain the Republican reluctance to adopt stricter ethics rules, especially when, as we've noted, liberal judges also engage in unethical behavior?
Megan: I mean, think about Congress' inability to stop its members from insider trading. Nobody is in favor of heavy scrutiny of themselves.
Ruth: I agree that it is unlikely, but I would like to suggest an interesting approach that could be very effective: a court inspector. Judges would baulk at the idea, but they might decide to do it themselves. It would not interfere with their institutional autonomy, but it would be a way to find facts and assure the public of ethical behavior.
Megan: Everyone is spending too much time trying to change the composition of the bench rather than reconsidering the idea that the court should strike down law after law. What we need is a truce where both sides have more deference to the legislature.
RUTH: With the way the Supreme Court is being misappointed — Senator Mitch McConnell blocked the replacement of Justice Antonin Scalia until President Trump took office, and then rushed through the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett before President Trump left office — it's natural for people to complain about the makeup of the Supreme Court. And it's a legitimate complaint.
Megan: The problem with retaliation is that it can easily escalate into a death spiral, and we're in that exact situation right now. Every escalation is truly worse than the last, so the losing party always genuinely convinces themselves that they're the victim and conveniently forgets all the times their side escalated.
Alexi: Personally, I think Democrats need to break with tradition more, but again, I recognize that this may be too flippant for a serious issue.
Megan: In the interest of bipartisan cooperation, I would be much happier if Ruth were setting the rules for the Supreme Court than we have now.
Ruth: A Luciverse please!
🙅🏽♀️🙅🏽♀️🙅🏽♀️
Consider a proposal to float the number of justices, written about in Politico by Scott Bodary, an assistant professor of political science at Gettysburg College, and Benjamin Pontz, a student at Harvard Law School.
The ideal solution would produce politically neutral results in the short term and, in the long term, assuage partisan sentiment and strengthen the institution's legitimacy before the public. Perhaps most importantly, as Supreme Court Commissioner Adam White stated in a statement about the commission's work, any solution should encourage continued “self-reform undertaken in a spirit of restraint.” On a practical level, any proposed reforms would need to be implementable through legislation, not through an unattainable constitutional amendment.
In another Supreme Court-related development, there's a surprise for Trump supporters who are hoping the court will soon rule that Trump has presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. “One of the most surprising aspects of this potential ruling is that it could give near-dictatorial powers to Biden with just a few months left in his term,” argues David Faris, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University.
He wrote in a Newsweek op-ed:
A president can declare martial law at will, deploy the military against American citizens and cities, personally murder critics, journalists, and rivals, and issue legal memoranda indefinitely suspending the U.S. Constitution without fear of legal liability. In a world in which Justice Samuel Alito and his colleagues have decided that Donald Trump exists outside the rule of law, the only real constraint on presidential power is whether other people are willing to carry out his orders. And after sitting through the Oscar-winning film Zone of Interest, which depicts the Auschwitz commandant holding a garden party in his backyard while the screams of murdered innocents echo all around, you can’t necessarily expect anyone to know where the line is.
This week, 4 years ago
In June 2020, Washington Post columnist Molly Roberts reported on a hilarious turn of events in a dark time: K-pop fans from around the world had disrupted a Trump rally in Tulsa. “The president had trotted out in the days leading up to the rally, expecting a million people. In the end, only about 6,200 supporters showed up to the 19,000-seat arena,” Roberts wrote. “TikTok's teen army claimed responsibility for the failure of last weekend's comeback campaign event, declaring that they had signed up for hundreds of thousands of tickets as a prank.”
Are monsters erotic? Novelist Emily Gould writes about the emerging erotic genre in The Cut. Read more. Rude? The Washington Post editorial board applauds Maryland Governor Wes Moore's (D) decision to expunge marijuana convictions. Read more. How many more? Washington Post contributing columnist Kate Cohen pays tribute to the lives lost after the Dobbs ruling. Worth a read.
Source link
