Biden says he’ll call for Supreme Court reform in final months in office
Biden says he’ll call for Supreme Court reform in final months in office
Biden delivered remarks from the Oval Office outlining his decision not to seek reelection, his first on-camera remarks since making that announcement on Sunday. In addition to explaining why he is ending his candidacy, he listed off his priorities for his remaining time as president.
“And I’m going to call for Supreme Court reform, because this is critical to our democracy,” Biden said.
Multiple outlets have reported that Biden is considering proposals to establish term limits for Supreme Court justices and an enforceable ethics code for those on the high court.
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Add 2 seats to the bench, and then add 13 total judges. 11 of 22 judges are selected at random to determine the case. The non voting judge opinion becomes part of the case law, as well as an intercollegiate constitutional scholar opinion
This matches the broad strokes of the approach I favor as well.
There are 13 Federal circuits. Expand to one justice per circuit, then double that.
But the core of the approach, regardless of the exact number, is to shift to having cases heard by randomized panels of judges. The amount of power wielded by individual justices right now is just insane. Dilute it down so that the power rests with the body rather than individuals.
Further, randomizing who hears any given case would help curtail the current environment where test cases get tailored to the idiosyncracies and pet theories of individual judges.
SCOTUS should be deciding cases based on rational reading of the law, not entertaining wing nut theories that Thomas or Alito hinted at in previous decisions. That sort of nonsense becomes a lot less feasible if there's no guarantee a case will actually end up in front of Thomas or Alito.
If you triple instead of double that you could have a three judge panel (like federal districts do) that could rule on smaller cases that come out of that circuit. Then, if needed, they could call a full 9 - 11 judge panel if it's a larger topic. This would also allow them to hear many more cases than they currently do, which has been a problem for decades.
I'd be in favor of more. 26 is just because I think there's a very easy argument to make for "every circuit gets direct representation on SCOTUS" and it's not a huge leap to go to two per circuit from there.
Increasing throughput is definitely one of the reasons I'd support doing this as well. Thanks for highlighting that since I didn't.
I totally agree! Just saying you could make that exact same argument but for three per district and it opens up a bunch more possibilities.