●A Gallup poll that shows rising public approval for the court, with far more Americans thinking it is “about right” ideologically than either too conservative or too liberal.Apparently, people aren't feeling too activated about the Supreme Court, even after that uproar over Justice Kavanaugh last year. Nevertheless, there are ideas about changing it. There's ending life tenure, which requires a constitutional amendment and therefore won't happen, but Marquette asked about it and 72% favored fixed terms for Justices over life terms.
●An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey showing two-thirds of people trust the court to operate in the best interests of the public, and 70 percent think the court has the right amount of power.
●A massive survey from Marquette Law School finding that a majority of Americans have more confidence in the Supreme Court than other parts of the federal government and that few believe the justices take extremely liberal or extremely conservative positions....
I think the results would be very different if the question had been, "The Constitution provides for Supreme Court Justices to have their positions for life; would you support an amendment process to change that to a fixed term?" That bundles 2 ideas that I think are influential: 1. If something is in the Constitution, it was probably put there for a good reason and is part of our tradition, and 2. It's so hard to change the Constitution, that any talk about it is just for political effect.
The other proposed change, as phrased in the Marquette poll, is "Increase the number of justices on the US Supreme Court." This would not require a constitutional amendment and there's a history to this idea, which is generally referred to as "Court-packing." The poll, quite properly, didn't use the word "Court-packing."
The respondents in the Marquette poll opposed “court-packing” by a 57 percent to 42 percent margin. But Democrats were evenly split on the idea, and even that 40 percent support was startling to [one law professor].Yeah, but the pollsters did not use the term, and I think it would have skewed the results, because would be heard as pejorative.
“I can’t emphasize enough what a sea change that is,” [she] said. The term court-packing “used to be an epithet.”
I think it's a terrible idea for Democrats to push these changes. They should not be talking about tearing down what people respect, only about choosing better nominees and improving the balance of types of judicial minds on the Court. A subset of voters could get activated about changing the Court, but if that happened, it would bring out conservatism in far more people. Court-packing looks blatantly political, and advocating it makes a candidate looks untrustworthy.
ADDED: Pete Buttigieg just did an interview (with Cosmopolitan) in which he "floated the ideas" of Court-packing and term limits. He presents these ideas as a potential cure for "the descent of the Supreme Court into becoming yet another political body":
[R]ight now, every time there’s a vacancy, there’s this apocalyptic ideological battle and it hurts the court and it hurts the country.He's not really advocating these bad ideas, just talking about them for effect. Let's be open-minded... or, that is, let's have "some level of open-mindedness." (Are you ready to be deeply immersed in Buttigieg rhetoric? It's looked nice from a distance, but, close up, it may be an infuriating muddle!)
So I’ve floated several ideas and deliberately kept some level of open-mindedness about which ones are going to work best.
One of them would be to have 15 members, but 5 of them can only be seated if the other 10 unanimously agree. The idea here is you get more justices who think for themselves. Justices like Justice Kennedy or Justice Souter...It's an "idea"... not his idea, and he's not owning the prediction that you'd get Kennedys and Souters this way or even that Kennedys and Souters are what we want on the Court. What's this idea of "justices who think for themselves"?! He must mean Justices who are less predictably conservative or liberal, but are swing Justices "thinking for themselves" and the other Justices are not? If the other Justices can't think for themselves, how would you ever get every single one of them to embrace this alien — a Justice who thinks for himself — into their midst? It would just be 10 Justices forever, and why would 10 be better than 9? Because tie votes are so helpful?
Another approach would be to have term limits. You know, Supreme Court justices, they used to just retire like everybody else. But now, we have these strange scenarios of people clinging, almost seeming to cling on for dear life because they want to make sure that they leave the bench under the right presidency. And this would help deal with that issue. Someone suggested that we rotate judges on and off the appellate bench.Ha ha. That was some clear talk. Right now, it seems to point directly at Ruth Bader Ginsburg — "seeming to cling on for dear life because they want to make sure that they leave the bench under the right presidency." I'm surprised he said that. And he is right that Justices are hanging onto to their power too far into old age. This is an issue that resonates nicely with his own political struggle, as a young man in a race with 3 elderly candidates in front of him.
The reason I’m introducing these very bold ideas is to elevate our imagination about them.It's all about playing with ideas, not actually embracing them. Stretch your mind!
But I’m not arriving in office saying I have the answer on this one. So the first step that I’ll do is to appoint a commission with this mission: Make the Supreme Court less political. Give us a road map to do that. And then based on their recommendations, I will go to Congress with a proposal. If absolutely necessary, we might have to have a conversation about an amendment, but I believe most of these reforms could be achieved within the framework of the current constitution.We might need to have a conversation! We need a commission and we might need a conversation. I like the idea of nothing happening, with a slight opening for the possibility that way in the future, something could happen, if it ever proved better than nothing. If Buttigieg is running on the secret slogan "Better than nothing is a high standard," he's my guy.
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