How to rein in partisan Supreme Court justices (Brookings Institute)

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/03/23/how-to-rein-in-partisan-supreme-court-justices/

*snip*

The impression of a highly politicized court is the result of decisions that flout bedrock principles of judicial comportment—norms such as meaningful respect for precedent, open and deliberative process, evidence-based, reasoned, and publicly explained decisions, deference to democratically elected or selected officials, and good faith fidelity to what relevant legal provisions say and what they have long been understood to mean.

For instance, on February 7 of this year, the Court, by a 5-4 vote, bypassed regular order to suspend implementation of a unanimous ruling by a panel of three lower court judges—two Trump appointees and one Obama appointee. The panel had held that the 1965 Voting Rights Act required invalidation of the Alabama legislature’s 2022 congressional election district map; that map yielded one black representative and six white representatives, although blacks constitute 27% of the state’s voters. The extraordinary intervention—by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neal Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—infuriated, not only the three liberal justices—Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—but conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts scolded his customary allies—“The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction.”

In effect, the five-justice majority had rushed to nullify longstanding statutory ballot access guarantees designed to protect an essential Democratic constituency, applicable nationwide, months before the 2022 congressional elections. The prevailing justices used an expedited procedure traditionally reserved for rare and genuine emergencies. In this instance, the procedure afforded a drastically foreshortened opportunity for briefing to acquaint the justices with the circumstances of the case, no opinion for the Court, nor any articulated rationale.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor had, during an oral argument two months earlier, sharply censured the conservative bloc’s similarly irregular intervention to sideline longstanding abortion rights protections. “Can this institution survive,” Sotomayor fairly spat out, “the stench that this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?”

*snip*

[PortTack]

1. Bookmarking

[Hoyt]

2. Don't elect GOPer Presidents and/or Senators.

[dmr]

3. If only we could rid ourselves of

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neal Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

I don't care how we rid ourselves of these unqualified partisans.