RBG scare: David Axelrod warns Supreme Court vacancy fight could 'tear this country apart'

Washington Examiner ^ | Aug. 23, 2019 | Daniel Chaitin

[libstripper]

That didn't take long.

A former Obama adviser set the stage for a potentially nasty confirmation fight in the Senate next year within an hour of the Supreme Court announcing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently completed three weeks of radiation treatment after doctors found a localized cancerous tumor on her pancreas.

* * *

Ginsburg, who is 86, has battled various illnesses over the last 20 years. The Supreme Court said in a statement Friday that she “tolerated the treatment well" and concluded that there is no evidence of disease elsewhere in her body.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Couldn’t the same thing, or at least a major improvement, be had by passing a simple one sentence amendment that says “U.S.Supreme Court Judges terms are limited to 20 years”.

I like the spirit of that challenge; we don’t need long-winded amendments in the Constitution.

1. I firmly believe that it’s just as ^more important to fix the number of sitting justices as ^than it is to fix the term (not term limits, we are speaking of the duration of a single term) which the justices serve. We don’t want any “court packing” going on. Not even a whisper about it. That conceit should be made a dead letter.

2. The math I used earlier applies if you want each presidential election to matter to SCOTUS as much - and no more than - its predecessors and its successors. We have been lucky that some of the worst presidents have named the fewest SCOTUS justices. It might go differently in the future. The bad news has been that confirmation by the Senate always was an obstacle to the seating of good justices. As long as the Senate isn’t in hostile hands, Trump is doing OK because of the Reid Rule. I hope Reid cringes at every mention of that. He went out of his way to deserve it.

So I think best that each newly elected and inaugurated POTUS install one or two, I think two, SCOTUS justices. And try to rig/incent the system so that early retirements/deaths on the bench are unlikely. Fixed terms for justices not exceeding 22 years seems to fit that bill.

Bottom line is that you can say,

“Each newly elected POTUS names two SCOTUS justices upon inauguration.
The most senior justices must retire as necessary to hold the number of SCOTUS justices at eleven.”

That takes court packing off the table, establishes a fixed number of justices named by the winner of each presidential election, and fixes the term of each justice at 22 years. What’s so complicated about that?

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I said, "fixes the term of each justice at 22 years. “

It does that - but it phases them in. That’s the reason not to just state the 22 year term explicitly.

[PGR88]

We would consider the same from our side to be heroic.

good point.

[Verginius Rufus]

I’m not worried that Trump will “go wobbly” if there is a vacancy—I fully expect him to pick from the list he publicized before the 2016 election.

[ChildOfThe60s]

I have a bipolar, delusional, alcoholic SIL who got fixated on me and accused me of a number of things.

Every family has one, and the lib dirt diggers know and love them.

[Cen-Tejas]

Nothing, your “summary” and “bumper sticker makes sense.

Notwithstanding the fact that we just increased the cost of the Supreme Court by several million but what the heck in a multi trillion dollar money machine.