Framing and Supreme Court Reform

Politics and religion
1

Framing is hugely important and IMO the Dems are not very good at it, at least historically speaking. So I’d like all of us here to consider the following points on framing of the issue of Supreme Court Reform going forward:

1)Trump and the Republicans have been packing the courts, especially the US Supreme Court for years. Whenever this discussion comes up, this point needs to be emphasized.

2)The Dems need to reform / rebalance / expand the Supreme Court. Never use the terms “packing” or “court packing”.

In terms of #1, the GOP packed the Supreme Court when they refused to even give Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland a hearing. Didn’t give him a hearing. Didn’t give him a vote.

The GOP also packed the Supreme Court when they changed the rules on the filibuster to confirm Gorsuch as a Justice without the 60 vote threshold that had been in place for decades.

The GOP also packed the Supreme Court when they reversed themselves form 2016 and rushed through Barret in a few weeks right before an election.

The GOP also packed the lower courts by holding up Obama’s district court and appellate court nominees, leaving those openings for Trump to fill.

The GOP also packed the courts by picking incredibly young and inexperienced Judges, including Judges not considered qualified by lawyers (the ABA) and Judges with no trial experience.

The GOP also packed the courts by picking incredibly extreme Judges, with little qualifications or experience, who endorse extreme views.

The GOP also packed the courts on the state level in a bunch of different ways, from holding up Dem nominees to ramming through unqualified judges to changing the rules.

The GOP has been packing the courts over and over for years.

As to #2, the Supreme Court is out of balance now and needs reform. We need to expand ALL of the federal courts since they haven’t been expanded in over 40 years and the country is much larger now. We need to improve technology in the courts. We need to improve access to the courts. We need court expansion, AND court reform AND court rebalancing.

I urge all of us here to consider these framing points. Framing matters. A Lot. And the GOP has been kicking our asses at it for years. This is a good opportunity to fight back on framing.

The GOP has been packing the courts for years and to fight that, we must reform the courts.

Thank you, please drive thrue.

2

This is great. Thank you. My axe, and all that.

3

I would frame it as a simple mistake made back in '16. Apparently, we DO consider nominations to the Supreme Court made during the final year of a president’s term, so we need to correct the error by voting on Garland Merrick – he was unfairly denied his hearing and vote.

Oh, we need to create a spot for him? Sure, Congress can do that.
(And should our opponents object that you cannot have an even number of justices on the court, well, sure, we can fix that, too.)

4

The problem with that is that it’s insufficient to redress the balance. When the GOP stole 2 nominations, they shifted the balance to 6-3. Adding Garland won’t make much difference in many cases. If you’re going to take the political hit for expanding the Court, then do it sufficiently to secure a majority.

Also, Garland is 67 years old. Whatever else Dems do, they need to stop spending lifetime appointments on people who are already that old. Find someone who is 55 or 50, someone who will be on the Court for a generation or more.

5

The whole process has been twisted so that the entire federal judicial nomination process is controlled by one senator who received fewer than a million votes in his last election. That’s not how it is designed.

Call it the Mitch McConnell Court Reform Act. He is the true author of this legislation.

6

Framing is important, but so is honesty. There is a popular myth that the lower courts are now filled with Trump appointees, but that’s not really the case. Obama appointed 327 lower court judges, far more than Trump (217). Of those, 311 are still serving.

Of course Obama had two terms, but so did GWB who appointed slightly fewer (325). Clinton appointed more than both of them (376). There are currently 397 Clinton+Obama lower court appointees still in office, compared to 374 appointed by GWB+Trump. In case you are wondering, only 29 judges appointed by Reagan and GHWB are still active.

In fact, the average number of new judges per year was significantly higher under Clinton+Obama (44/yr) than under Bush (41/yr). Adding in Trump, the numbers are closer: Bush+Trump averages 45/yr.

In other words, the Trump hiring frenzy is what it looks like when one side wants to quickly rebalance the lower courts. It is no surprise that accelerating the rate of hiring will lower the overall quality of hires. But I do not believe the way to fix that mistake is to repeat it.

7

This is a wild understatement of the level of qualification or the motivations, and ignores the stealing of Garland’s seat, which requires at least two seats be added to have the appropriate balance.

8

If you are implying that I am advocating dishonesty, I am greatly offended.

It’s more likely you didn’t understand the concept of framing rather than intended to be beyond-the-pale insulting to the point I would have to report you, but it’s grossly inappropiate.

9

I’m just referring to the lower courts. The SCOTUS is a different matter.

As for qualifications: 10 of Trump’s appointments were ABA rated as not qualified, compared to 4 of Clinton’s, 8 of GWB’s, and none of Obama’s. I don’t think there are wild differences.

10

10/217 vs 4/703 seems like a big difference. I also think the ideological differences are large - Obama nominates an old centrist to replace Scalia, Trump replaced Ginsburg with a young extremist. The rest of the appointees are also showing themselves to have extreme views, such as all the attempts to suppress votes

11

No, I don’t think you are dishonest. I just thought it was very amusing that you juxtaposed “don’t call it packing” with “they did the packing”.

But I guess I should have chosen a better opening line, like “Let’s be realistic”. I do think a lot of these discussions (not singling you out, everyone is doing it) tend to be too hyperbolic and apocalyptic.

12

Obama is a centrist. Trump is an extremist.

We got the Justices that America voted for. Or at least the Justices that the Electoral College voted for.

13

I agree, so maybe 1) say something about where many of those vacancies Trump filled came from, and 2) consider that the hackery of the Trump judges has less to do with the pace of filling empty seats and more to do with their desire to appoint hacks.

14

Republicans manipulated the process to create vacancies that they could fill with their people.

Whereas now, we want to manipulate a different process to create vacancies that we can fill with our people.

Look, I’m perfectly willing to match dirty trick with dirty trick. I’m just not falling for the rhetoric that ours is the more noble effort. It’s simply a protracted power struggle. Necessary, perhaps. But if they were packers, then we are packers too.

15

I mostly agree with magnet’s point here - I think the fat more effective argument is to say that

a) the GOP has shown that it will never respect the will of the minority party, so it is imperative for Dems to be as focused on the will of those who elected them as the GOP is for their voters
b) the GOP broke norms (and frequently, laws) to push their agenda in the court and with the executive, so the Dems cannot allow norms alone to constrain them
c) the current court, especially the SCOTUS, has been filled disproportionately by extremists appointed by a president and senate that represent the minority of the population. That wrong should be righted along with whatever can be done to prevent the party that got fewer votes from reshaping the court to its extreme views.

16

You really don’t understand framing, do you?

I guess you’ll never have a successful career in sales or litigation.

17

Much like the Wehrmacht. If they were invaders, then we were invaders too.

18

America’s greatest day in WW2 was literally the invasion of Normandy.

LOL, or for that matter as a propagandist!

But that’s OK, I’m not looking for a second career.

19

Indeed, but I think only a fool would argue that it isn’t honest to say that the Wehrmacht were the invaders and we were the ones redressing the imbalance they created with their invasion. The one is not really like the other.

20

Who is redressing an imbalance? Because in the lower courts, Democrats held a large advantage once Obama appointed his last judge. And after all the norm breaking of McConnell and Trump, the number of active lower court judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans are nearly identical.

So if anyone redressed an imbalance, it was the Republicans. Of course, everyone knows that their goal was not to “balance” the courts, their goal was to pursue power. But likewise, Democrats cannot further “balance” the lower courts. If they want to pack them, it will be in order to restore a prior imbalance that favored them.