The Changes We Need

I keep seeing memes go by on social media that list changes we need to make once we get the fascists out of office. There are some good items on those lists and the people sharing them have good intentions, but at least two of the items drive me nuts: term limits for the Supreme Court and ending the electoral college.

It’s not that I disagree with those ideas – the electoral college should have been tossed out long ago and while I’m generally skeptical about term limits the lengths suggested are reasonable – but rather that they aren’t going to happen.

The Constitution provides for appointment for life for Supreme Court justices (and all federal judges) and it also sets up the electoral college. To get rid of those things, you need a constitutional amendment.

Getting a constitutional amendment is hard and in the current political climate probably impossible even if we throw all the bastards out in 2028.

However, there are things we can do that do not require amending the Constitution, and one of them would do a much better job of fixing the current disaster of the supreme court than term limits.

We need to expand the court.

There is no limit on the size of the court in the Constitution. The size of the court was set at nine members – eight associate justices and a chief justice – in 1869. At the time, the population of the United States was about 39 million, or roughly 10 percent of what it is now.

We actually need a larger court to get to all the issues the Supreme Court should handle. We need more judges on the federal district courts and the courts of appeal as well.

Further, term limits wouldn’t even apply to the current judges we need to get rid of, because any amendment would likely exempt them. We need to change the Supreme Court immediately and expansion would do that.

I point out that expansion would have done this in 2021 and that if it had been put in place, we would have a responsible court to offset the abusive nonsense going on right now. And please don’t tell me about the Democrats who wouldn’t go along. That would be Manchin and Sinema, and given that both those people are transactional as fuck, I do not believe that there wasn’t something they could have been given to get their vote.

We didn’t get expansion because President Biden, like most of us, was taught in school about Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to “pack the court,” and he still believed it was a terrible idea, a betrayal of the system. Historians point out that Roosevelt’s threat to expand the court made the court jump back into line and back the New Deal projects that brought the country back from the brink of destruction wrought by the kind of people who are ruining our country right now.

Biden was an institutionalist to the hilt. He did not understand – or refused to understand – what kind of real threats the country faced.

(I’ll just point out that the Mellon who recently jumped in to offer $130 million to help pay soldiers – a drop in the bucket, but still a lot of money – is the grandson and heir of Andrew Mellon, who was the Secretary of the Treasury when the Great Depression started and refused to do anything to help people because he wanted poor people to be desperate, just like the people we’re dealing with now. You should have heard my father, who was around for the Depression, on the subject of Andrew Mellon. FDR was cleaning up the mess made by Mellon and his boss President Hoover when he proposed expanding the court.)

We blew it on the court in 2021. If we get the chance in 2029, we need to go for it.

As for the electoral college, of course it needs to go. For that matter, we need to either ditch the Senate or at least elect members related to the population. I live in California, where 40 million people have the same number of senators as the 500,000 in Wyoming. It’s neither fair nor reasonable, but like the electoral college, changing the makeup of the Senate requires a change to the Constitution that isn’t going to happen.

What we can also do instead is make Washington, D.C., which incidentally has more people than either Wyoming or Vermont, a state, with two senators and a member of the House with an actual vote.

We could do the same with Puerto Rico – assuming they don’t want independence instead – and perhaps with some of the other territories we control, like Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

But definitely D.C., where people are extremely tired of taxation without representation, and even tireder of national politicians using them as a punching bag. The National Guard is still playing havoc there, and you will recall that the Mayor could not call out the Guard on January 6.

Those two things – which only require a willing president and a majority in Congress (and maybe ending the filibuster in the Senate) – could make a huge difference.

So when you’re drafting ideas for what we should do in 2029 (and it is 2029 we’re looking at right now, not 2028), think about things that can be done with a majority. Real things, that solve real problems, things that can be done fast.

I mean, we’re going to have a huge mess to clean up in 2029. We’re going to  need a Supreme Court that actually believes in the core principles of this country to give us the room to fix all the things that the current regime is breaking.