Without control of the White House, there is of course only so much Democrats can do with their newfound power. And in the context of the myriad horrors of the first half of President Donald Trump’s second term, talking about what the party “should” do next is roughly analogous to deciding which out-of-control forest fire to fight first: There is not enough water, there are lots of worthy candidates, and all of them are getting worse.
One thing must be true, though: Whatever issues Democratic lawmakers choose to focus on—and, as the 2028 ideas primary gets underway, whatever ambitious ideas Democratic presidential hopefuls choose to support—the party must also have a plan for taking on the Supreme Court, which remains an existential threat to anything Democrats might hope to accomplish. Even if the party is fortunate enough to win a trifecta—the House, the Senate, and the White House—in 2028, things like a Green New Deal and Medicare for All and a new Voting Rights Act do not stand a chance before this six-justice conservative supermajority. Regrettably, what I wrote in 2020 is just as true today: If Congress passes any one of these proposals into law, the only real question is which justice ends up writing the opinion that kills it.
Expand the House, too! I’d make it as representative as what they had when they designed the system: 3,929,214 people represented in the first Census by 65 Representatives by the end of the first Congress, or around 60,000 constituents per Representative. Taking that as a nice round number for our putative replacement for the Reapportionment Act, we’d end up with 5,524 Representatives. It’d effectively end the utility of gerrymandering, hugely dilute the extra votes in the electoral college given to states with small population, and could even make possible the rise of more than two parties acting in two coalitions, instead.
I believe the House should truly reflect the power of the people.
I propose we increase the size of the US House to 343 million.
Ideally the House should have proportional representation. That would kill gerrymandering and allow more parties. But it would probably require a constitutional amendment.
Also make corruption harder to pull off. Buying two or three swing votes is easy. Buying two or three hundred is harder.
I would rather they talk about holding the sitting judges accountable for ethics violations and adding term limits. Expansion seems like a good way to end up where we are now, but with more seats to worry about in 10 or 15 years.
18 year term limits is ideal. It’s the shortest term that doesn’t allow a single 2-term President to swap out the majority of the Court.
Just impose a 16 year term limit.
The Supreme Court takes bribes and is biased. That is a complete failure of the intent of what the supreme court should be.
no, it still is a separate office that is exchanged less often than congress or the senate
That idea is just plain stupid. *refusesToElaborateAndFliesAway*
Instead of seven shitty judges they want 13 and they can’t reasonably justify it. LOL
Voters turning MISSISSIPPI BLUE is NOT a Sign that we should do Something EXTREME like This! INSTEAD Voters PROBABLY want to See us HELP Trump with His Agenda!
-Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer!
Before there is talk of expansion, let’s talk about pruning Thomas from the tree. His ass is explicitly corrupt. In the normal way, not the “let’s visit atrocities on women and minorities” way the other conservatives on the court are.
He’s an easy impeachment target. He doesn’t deserve a soft landing into retirement. He deserves prison, and so does his treasonous bulldog wife.
Also Kavanaugh, who committed perjury in his hearings. He also lied to Susan Collins. You know those gang rape pervs at Cornell? Kavanaugh was that kind of a guy. He would have been first in line, encouraging the others, and texting his buddies to come over.
Here’s another thing that needs to be addressed:
In 1789 each house representative represented roughly 5000 voters.
Each senator represented roughly 14000 voters.
In 2026 each house representative represents roughly 600,000 voters.
Each senator represents roughly 2.5 million voters.
I’m not sure that system was meant for scale.
The designers figured that was a next generation problem and that people will be smart enough then to figure it out.
The future people, apparently, was not.
The Senate was made that way deliberately. It’s not based on population.
The point is that when this system was created, the number of people you had “power over” ostensibly, were far far fewer than today. And scale matters a lot.
If you have a hundred people, and one raving lunatic cult psycho, that’s easily contained.
If you have three hundred million people, you suddenly have an army of three hundred thousand raving lunatic cult psychos with serious political sway coming your way.
Talk about impeaching judges who took bribes now. Expand the court next.
The latter would make the former infinitely more possible.
Impeachment of Supreme Court justices doesn’t involve the courts at all. It’s done solely through Congress.
But it does require a 2/3 majority.
anything the shitstain doesn’t like also requires a two-thirds majority (of both chambers) to override his veto.
the bar is slightly lower for impeachment, as laying the charges only requires simple majority in the house.
Annoyingly, getting a 2/3 majority would be easier in Congress.
In the Senate.
Yes, but that’s even worse as it requires more Republican representatives to flip.
SCOTUS settles numerous disputes and could, like they did in the early 2000s, change the outcome of contested elections. If they do so to those that may have the plan to impeach the court, there is little anyone can do to stop them. Therefore expanding the court first takes priority, to prevent the court from retaliation.
You want to expand the Supreme Court before the next election?
Tell me, who nominates Supreme Court justices for the Senate to vote on?
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And you, specifically, are why the Iron Front wanted to shoot Marxists alongside Fascists and Monarchists.
Go reread the thread. The only one lacking reading comprehension here is you .
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Based on your extensive comment history it’s not really a wonder that you feel that way. I would bet you also feel that way about the average person on the street or anyone else you intentionally misread.
Actually, that would have to be the opposite order. The court can’t be expanded until there isn’t a republican in the Whitehouse. So priority must be given to impeachment so that the current bad actors don’t try to overturn the next election to save themselves.
They can’t expand the court before the SC can fuck with the midterm elections.
I used to believe that we needed expand SCOTUS to 13, but I no longer believe that. Now I believe that we should expand SCOTUS to 29 seats, with rolling term limits, so every president gets to appoint a few.
The number of seats shouldn’t be so low that one bad faith president can negatively affect governmental policy for the next 50 years.
I agree with the rolling term limits, but I’m not sure i understand 29. I can see 9 judges, 18 years limits, replace 1 every 2 years. Alternatively, i think 21 judges, 21 years limits, replace 1 every year.
With 29 seats, are you proposing 29 year term limits, and replace one every year?
Look, I’m definitely not an expert, I just play one on social media posts. I’m not suggesting a complete plan, just a basic framework.
I’m not married to 29, it just needs to be large enough that it couldn’t be skewed too much in any direction. 21 would probably work. There are 13 districts, so maybe there should be three judges from each district, for a total of 39.
I was thinking 18-20 year terms, and mandatory retirement at 75.
There are a LOT of other factors as well, but I’d let the experts decide. My only deal is size. SCOTUS needs to be a lot bigger.
I like the idea of more judges. Some one else mentioned the idea of a lottery for each case which i also really like. Mostly I think having power concentrated in a few hands for life is anti democratic and does nothing except serve the rich.
I could see real advantages to having a quite large Supreme Court where the justices who hear and decide a case are a subset of the total and the ones who hear a case are selected at random from the pool. Similar such systems already exist in the circuit courts and it helps to prevent gaming of the system. It’s much harder to game out who you need to appeal to in your arguments when you don’t know for sure who’s going to hear your case. Also makes it possible for them to hear more cases. I think Congress also ought to use their power and tell the Supreme Court that no, actually you DON’T get to say our laws are unconstitutional. That was wrong back when you started doing it and its wrong now.
Who else would determine that laws are unconstitutional? I’m not very familiar with the US legal system.
It would be on Congress to do so. Or possibly the courts and the executive could give Constitutional rights higher priority, if there’s a conflict. The law would still stand, but anything explicitly specified in the Constitution would take priority.
The Supreme Court has been proven that it can be corrupted. It needs to be rebuilt so that can’t happen again.
“I think we should have term limits for the supreme court.”
“But no term limits means they aren’t beholden to political interests and can stay unbiased!”
Tell Thomas’ RV that he is unbiased.
God I wish this would have happened
I think 9 judges is probably fine, but they should be term limited to 18 years, and we replace one judge every 2 years. Every president would get to seat a minimum of 2 judges. It would limit all the politicking around placing a judge, it would also eliminate the game of placing a young idealist that can server for 50 years.
It should be a pool of judges, and 5 or 7 or 9 or whatever are chosen at random for each case
Ah good old Athenian system. It’s very smart, and it works. If you can get the randomization unbiased and dependable. I think something mechanical, like those old lottery flying ping pong things.
The randomization being unbiased is the easiest thing possible. The choices being unbiased themselves is an entirely different beast
The choices will always be biased by design because we would be electing the people up for being randomly picked. Which is fair, I mean, that’s the point.
The randomization thing might be a “trivial problem”, but performing it in a matter that leaves no room for debate over whether the result was actually fair and real, that’s the issue. You need people to trust the process.
But I’ve said for the longest time, this is actually a working method that could cut out a lot of corruption in politics. If you have a pool of people, rather than just a single choice between two of them, it gets much harder for financial interests to bribe them, because they’d have to spend way more money and effort doing it.
This is basically proportional parliamentarism, or whatever, but it adds something important.
In any case, the two party state is just a one party state with schizophrenia. It has to go.
I mean at that point just have the supreme court be elected. Split the country up into 9 regional districts and have each one elect a judge. Every 2 years have 3 of them up for re-election and every 6 years you get a full reset.
Term limits first. Lifetime appointment is stupid and you might as well ask for corruption up front.
Then electoral college. 0 reason for that shit to still exist. Farmers can pick up their farms and move to Canada or Mexico if they dont like being outvoted.
Then we can worry about universal accountability, starting with the removal of absolute and qualified immunity. The concept of immunity in law is a cancer to actual justice. Once we actually start holding justices and judges accountable for their actions, we can consider having more.
Elimination of the Electoral College is at hand. They only needed two more states to vote for some new Electoral College Pact, in which states agree to give their electoral votes to the popular vote winner, essentially making the el action a popular vote, which it should be.
Enough statehouses flipped that if two of them voted for the pact, it would automatically take effect, or something like that. I don’t know all the details, I’ve just heard some really positive talk about it.
Or at least age limits. No one over 65.
Age isn’t the problem, corruption is. Politicians who have been in office longer are more corrupt, age is just a by product.
My life is seemingly filled with dementia-addled seniors at the moment. Age is definitely a problem.
A revolving door would just make them get all their corruption done quickly. There isn’t really a good solution, because power will always still attract people who want to abuse it.
If term limits are good for the President, why not Congress. Or, should we eliminate term limits for the President?
I disagree. Newly elected folks who aren’t career politicians are far less corrupt than those who’ve been in office for decades and who have established relationships with the filthy rich.
Power doesn’t initially exclusively attract people who want to abuse it, the corruption comes over time. Power corrupts, but not immediately.
Its not like the farmers are getting much good out of the vote they made anyway
Pointless until we have a Dem in the White House
Start with impeaching the corrupt fucks instead
Everything everywhere all at once, flood their news feed and hit them so hard they can’t keep up. Our turn, we will give these people a better life god damn it, we are gonna democratic it up and respect and protect their rights and interests. I can’t wait to force these people to have country that meets their needs.
That only works for Republicans because it takes virtually no effort to flail around breaking shit but an immense amount of effort to build something worthwhile.
Also, dems still have little power to enact change without the presidency. Not that they have no power, but don’t expect a bunch of new laws or reversed executive orders within the next two years. The biggest win is Republicans’ ability to continue breaking shit is now greatly diminished.
At least things are so broken now that little improvements seem huge. For example, look at Mamdani filling potholes in NYC.
dems still have little power to enact change without the presidency
Hello, I live in Texas, and this is not true. Our day to day lives are going to immediately change. Also, the Trump Administration just lost the cooperation of Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, and probably Kansas and Alaska. Come January, more states will be unified against the federal government than have been in a long time
Also good
We don’t need just more justices. We need age and term limits. Being allowed to feather their nests with bribes forever has clearly corrupted many of the justices on the bench.
I like the idea of 13 justices, with one overseeing each of the federal circuits.
39 justices, 3 for each circuit. Choose the randomly as cases come up.
