Posted on 12/05/2005 11:15:51 AM PST by ZGuy
The Supreme Court has pretty much BEEN a doomsday scenario for the past 40 or 50 years.
The trick is to prevent a shooting war when someone disagrees with someone else.
What if there were no clear President nor any Congress?
OMG, You'd have a country headed for a disaster of biblical proportions, Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff.
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling.
Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together... mass hysteria
JRB, Wilkinson, Garza, Luttig, McConnell, Jones, Clement, Ted Olsen, and Bork.
Problem solved.
There is a simple solution to this "problem."
If there is no one left in the Constitutional line of succession, you hold an election! (Duh.)
there was one?
Wrong! The president (or acting president) simply makes nine recess appointments.
LOL.
What I am getting at is that there ought to be an "automatic refill" for the SCOTUS, so that if all three branches were wiped out, there would be a valid Constitutional authority where disputes between, say, rival claimants of Presidential authority could be bloodlessly settled.
Better that than a war in the conintental US on top of a nuclear attack on a major US city.
We could always call Ghost Busters.
LOL! I don't care who you are, THAT was funny.
Any "automatic" refill of SCOTUS designed by a gang of academic talking heads will turn out to be an automatic way to fill it with liberal stooges.
Why not just come out and say that the ACLU should have the right to appoint replacements? Or a faculty senate of left-wing law professors?
Fiddledeedee. Distributed circuit courts would stand.
I kind of liked the idea of having "alternates" chosen by the President and Congress in the normal fashion of justice selection, or having senior judges from the US Circuit Courts be considered alternates, or maybe even retired SCOTUS judges.
No need to expand the court or anything, and it doesn't open the court up to any more ideological tilt than it now has or has had in the past.
Then it really wouldn't make any difference if there were a Supreme Court - Constitutionally, there is no way that the Supreme Court can govern anything in the absence of the President or the Congress. Congress could at least create a new President, or the President could continue the executive operation of the United States in the absence of Congress. The SCOTUS, however, cannot administer anything, and cannot even issue court orders unless they are within the context of a legal case (or are intended to govern the federal court system).
Say there was no supreme court at the time of the 2000 Florida recount fiasco. The case would instead have been brought to whichever federal circuit court had jurisdiction over Florida, and that court's word would have every bit as legitimate as SCOTUS's.
Exactly. By law, there is a very well defined list of successors to the Presidency, and I believe that it has been policy for a long while to not have the whole list in one place at any point in time.
Whoever becomes President immediately does recess appointments for all dead cabinet officers and Supreme Court justices, and permanent appointments get sorted out at leisure when Congress is able to operate again
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