well since federal judges are also politically nominated, how's it different? would it not also leave open the argument that if another set of judges were to decide on the case it would end with a different result if the composition was different one way or another? it's the same thing. it's politicizing justice.
you'll just have to live with 100% politicized courts. talking about the size or format is irrelevant as long as the substance (process of selection of judges) is a political circus.
I don’t think we have to live with that.
More specifically though, the issue isn’t just “politicization,” it’s blatant
corruption. And we have a mechanism for dealing with that, it’s called impeachment. The issue here isn’t having a conservative mindset; Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and ACB have that, but none have shown signs of being actually corrupt.
When you have SCOTUS justices accepting lavish gifts from political mega donors, and then on top of that the justice doesn’t recuse when that mega donor has business before the Court, then we have a serious problem.
If Congress actually had some teeth and impeached and removed these corrupt pieces of shit, I bet you they’d settle down in a hurry.
You do have a valid point about federal judges being political nominations, that’s the obvious counter-point to my position. But when you’re dealing with only 9 justices, you only need to corrupt a couple of them. Try dealing with almost
900 judges, when you don’t even know which ones will hear a particular case, and corrupting the judiciary becomes much more difficult.
You certainly can’t—and shouldn’t—force a judge to recuse, or force them to decide cases a certain way, but you can sure AF kick their ass off the bench if they accept $500,000 luxury vacations as gifts.
it would be great if we could trust that they were all truly independent...............
Yeah that’s a big part of the struggle. I also think Congress should pass a law which defines “advice and consent of the senate” as being demonstrated by a vote of confirmation in the nominee, and requiring that the Senate take up any federal judicial nomination within a certain period of time (maybe 60 days or something). They should also prohibit the filibuster in federal judicial nominees.
No more of this stalling like they did with Garland, or filibustering every nominee like they did to Obama for years. Make the senate take up the nominee, commit to a vote so the People can see it.