Monday, July 29, 2024

Dark Brandon In Austin

Biden’s plan calls for enacting 18-year term limits on justices, to be cycled out every two years. It also calls for an amendment dismantling presidential immunity and ensuring future presidents are held accountable for any criminal acts in office. Lastly, he called on the creation of an ethic code that can be enforced, to curtail conflicts of interest as evidenced by controversies surrounding lavish gifts and trips given to Republican justices by wealthy conservative donors.
Except Thomas is getting older and seeing the time when he shuffles off this mortal coil come closer, and he said “Fuck it, I’m going for it,” and cashed in. Monetarily and ideologically. He literally told people like Harlan Crow that he was tired of living on a government employee’s salary, and if he couldn’t live the life to which he wanted to become accustomed, he’d quit.

The rest is ProPublica history.

And the younger ideologues don’t act like they have decades left to grow into their extreme notions.  Ultimately there is no guaranteed guard against ideology. I suppose the only one we have is to get you off the bench after 18 years. Thomas was pretty much a null set until very recently. That’s a pretty strong argument for getting him shuffled off the Court before it’s reputation is lower than the whorehouse it already is.

Thomas has been there since 1991 when Poppy put him on. Alito’s been there since 2006. Under Biden’s proposal, he’d be coming off this year, and Thomas would have come off 15 years ago. And ideology has become, not just a badge of honor, but more powerful than stare decisis. That seems to be a direct result of a lifetime sinecure that only ends with death.

Ideology on the bench will always be a problem (it’s the real and primary subject of the philosophical field of jurisprudence). But “lifetime” in 1789 didn’t mean what it does in 2024.

Thomas is 76; Alito is 74. If they were lower court judges, they’d have been eased into retirement by now. Of course, they’d also be covered by a much stricter code of ethics overseen by an independent panel, not by the Justices themselves individually. There’s nothing in the Constitution establishing the Justices each being laws unto themselves. The Chief Justice is not their boss. When they refuse to acknowledge a boss, it’s time to remind them “independent” does not mean they are authority supreme.

We the people have reformed government of, by, and for the people before; and it always raised questions about tampering with the status quo. High time to have that conversation again.

The immediate question is: will Trump once again feel like he’s fighting two opponents? Biden trying to take away his immunity and his pet Court, while Kamala laughs all the way into the White House?

Future’s so bright…😎

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1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal6:21 AM

    Anyone who worries about having a term limit impinging on "judicial independence" should be asked why having terms for Congress and the presidency doesn't carry the same risks. As well the idea that, somehow, giving them life tenure is supposed to ensure their ethics is certainly impeached by the present corruption on the court and the long, long history of "justices" voting for the most crassly partisan political reasons (Marbury v Madison was just such a ruling), the most obvious personal financial motives (every time those who held slaves ruled in favor of slavery, as John Marshall, Roger Taney and the other slave holding "justices" repeatedly did) and much other corruption on that most corrupt of the Courts. The history of the Supreme Court is as sordid as the history of the Congress, in some ways far more so and that has not gotten better in the world of Bush v Gore to the legalization of political corruption and presidential royal immunity in this term of the filthy corrupt Roberts Court.

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