Breaking Down Ted Cruz’s Plan for Supreme Court ‘Retention Elections’

National Review ^ | 07/03/2015 | Jim Geraghty

[SeekAndFind]

The Right found itself thoroughly defeated at the Supreme Court earlier this month, and Senator Ted Cruz offered one of the biggest and boldest proposals in response: Force Supreme Court justices to run for reelection every eight years.

“I am proposing an amendment to the United States Constitution that would subject the justices of the Supreme Court to periodic judicial-retention elections,” Cruz wrote in an NR piece last week. “Every justice, beginning with the second national election after his or her appointment, will answer to the American people and the states in a retention election every eight years. Those justices deemed unfit for retention by both a majority of the American people as a whole and by majorities of the electorates in at least half of the 50 states will be removed from office and disqualified from future service on the Court.”

The specific details of the proposal remain unresolved, and they’re important: Would current Supreme Court justices get grandfathered in and be exempt from the retention elections? Is a “national election” a presidential election or a midterm election? What if a judge has a majority but that majority comes from running up high margins in fewer than 25 states? How quickly would a rejected judge need to resign?

Most important of all, at a time when Republicans find winning 270 electoral votes in a presidential race challenging, how could conservatives be sure that the justices they prefer — Scalia, Thomas, Alito — would be retained under this proposal?

[duffee]

It could be done using not Presidential but Congressional elections and have them come up on the nearest to their 8 years but have no more than three up for retention in any election. Some of these would of course fall during Presidential elections.

[cva66snipe]

Well I think lifetime appointments to any position in government is a real bad idea. Term Limits could cure it also.

[conservativejoy]

Yes, he has said that, but given the ongoing nature of the battle, we need something more comprehensive in place to preclude this issue from continuing to plague society in general and Christians in particular.

[discostu]

Yep. And nothing ever changes. Judicial retention rates run about the same as congressional re-election... where also nothing ever changes.

[Georgia Girl 2]

Well elections can backfire on you bigtime and we have seen over and over. I think the term limit on the Supremes is a safer way to go.

[Paulie]

You keep missing the point.

And one of them is there are very few political options left to effect the kind of change we need. And precious little time to do it.

By Constitutionally accurate I mean using the letter of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to demonstrate for all to see/hear how wrong and destructive these activist judges are.

That is not ‘rule by ridicule’. That’s pressuring the judges to abandon their activism and rule based on the letter and the intent of the Constitution. The pressure comes from being embarrassed into doing their job correctly; doing the ‘right thing’.

I don’t know how to make it more clear than that.

Are you a lawyer, judge, clerk, or currently attending law school? On what basis do you say this would not be an effective tactic?

This isn’t my idea anyway - as I stated in the beginning, this is what several people in the legal field for quite a long time tell me. And it makes sense to me.