1223
Biden calls for supreme court reforms including 18-year justice term limits
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
1223 points (99.6% liked)
News
23275 readers
3597 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Okay, but it's not being prevented at all. The current system incentivizes corruption because, clearly, it is practically impossible to do anything about justices who have succumbed to that corruption. So within the context of an environment where billionaires can dump limitless money on a justice and the constituents of that justice can do nothing at all to recall them or even really reprimand them in any way, how is that not asking for corruption to happen?
Biden's proposals also includes an enforceable code of ethics to address corruption on the bench. And as Carrolade mentions, Congress can impeach and remove judges.
From the article:
If they aren't being removed and imprisoned for the kind of activity we see from, say, justice Thomas then the code of ethics isn't strict enough.
How many times has that happened in history? If the standard is set such that enforcement is practically impossible to reach, then the rules supposedly being enforced practically don't exist.
Well said. There's a strong tendency for people to revere tradition and the constitution a little too much. They forget that our democracy is old (as far as modern democracies go). The constitution was set up by a bunch of wealthy landowners (and some of them were slaveholders). It's a collection of pretty bad compromises that had to be amended 27 times...and now is practically impossible to amend.
Supreme Court Justice is a very important and respectable position, but there's nine of them (for now) because one person can't be trusted with too much power. I think it should be limited even further. We give them too much veneration and power under the current system. Treating these people as infallible demigods is what got us into this mess to begin with.
There actually is a method provided for justice removal, it just takes Congress, which also features corruption unfortunately. Also, just because there is some corruption evident does not mean it is not being prevented at all. Are all 9 corrupt? That would eventually happen if it was not prevented at all.
Importantly though, short term limits would also not prevent corruption, and would probably increase it, as Justices would become much more interested in joining businesses and lobbying organizations after their tenures are up. Hence, a middle ground is probably smarter.