Do we need a more "activist" Supreme Court, similar to the Earl Warren Court?

[kentuck]

(snip)
Growing liberal with age, much of Warren’s decisions were still rooted in Progressive beliefs supported by the rule of common law. Warren viewed crime as mutually exclusive to poverty, education, social conditions, degradation, and standards of law enforcement. Warren gravitated away from the strict hand by which he formerly dealt with perpetrators. Instead, he believed crime could be ridden by improving the condition of cities and thus took into account the influential conditions violators lived within. After the reaction to Brown v. Board of Education, Warren thought of the Court as a protector of the public, the means to restore ethics and mind the conducts of legislators. The Warren Court did not view constitutional law as text alone; it was living.

https://www.oyez.org/justices/earl_warren

[msongs]

1. the trump court not activist enuff? nt

[kentuck]

3. I think of this Court as more "reactionary".

In favor of the right-wing agenda.

[iemanja]

10. that's not what activist means

It means making law rather than interpreting it and respecting precedent. It isn't a definition that hinges on political orientation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_activism

[kentuck]

12. Wasn't the Warren Court considered an activist court.

We are talking about the Warren Court.

[iemanja]

13. Yes

But you didn't say you wanted a new Warren court. You said you wanted an activist court that you think means liberal. That's not what it means. It just so happens that RWers have for years complained about activist courts because judges tended to be somewhat liberal. That is no longer the case. The courts are stacked with terrible RWers, who are engaged in full-scale activism.

[kentuck]

14. "Do we need a more "activist" Supreme Court, similar to the Earl Warren Court?"

???

[iemanja]

15. Okay, but

I was responding to your point that claimed a distinction between activist and reactionary.

You know very well that we won't get such a court. The elections of 2000 and 2016 determined the courts we will have for at least a generation.

[Haggard Celine]

2. Just wait until they strike down Roe v. Wade.

[msongs]

4. tonite maybe according to rachel nt

[Ocelot II]

5. They are already activist - that is, instrumentalist - but not in a good way.

[Karma13612]

6. Yup, you beat me to it. ...eom

[Budi]

7. No. Just an equal & fair minded court. One that's not from the radical Federalist Society.

[napi21]

8. Not necessarily more activist, but more even. Too many members were named by Pug Prezes.

Some of the older ones need to retire & let Biden name their replacements.

[iemanja]

9. We have an activist court

at all levels of the judicial system, only it acts to the right.

[slightlv]

11. It's up to interpretation

I don't believe the founders meant to leave us a "dead" document - chiseled in stone. And yet, this is how Conservatives and Repubs see the constitution. It's also how they see the bible... and the world. It's all black and white. Interpreting a document as a "living" document means they really have to think and make gigantic leaps of intuition into how a current situation compares with a similar situation "back then." When you do this, you have to consider culture, past laws, past knowledge level, etc. Repubs can't do this... or won't. It's a lot of work.

The world isn't black and white. Neither are our guiding documents. Democrats realize this. Repubs don't. I'd love to have a more activist court in our mold of democracy, where current culture and situations are taken into account when dealing with laws and rules. Do you throw a man in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his kids? A law definitely has been broken; he stole. OTOH, he stole to feed his kids; a situation no parent should ever be placed in. Repubs would throw him in jail and let the kids starve or the world deal with them. They'd consider their job done once the law was fulfilled. Christ came to fulfil the law; but that law was love - not punishment. I believe Democrats would deal with compassion in the case of both the man and his kids. That's the kind of democracy I want to live under. That kind of love is anathema to both repubs and evangelicals today. And I'm not christian, nor would I be one in today's world of christianity.

[Groundhawg]

16. Please no!

I want Congress to make the law and the court to enforce the law. I do not want unelected judges making law!