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President Joe Biden promised Black voters Wednesday that he would appoint progressives to the US Supreme Court if elected to a second term, suggesting he expects vacancies on the high court over the next four years.
“The next president, they’re going to be able to appoint a couple justices, and I’ll be damned — if in fact we’re able to change some of the justices when they retire and put in really progressive judges like we’ve always had, tell me that won’t change your life,” he said during a campaign rally in Philadelphia.
It was as explicit a warning as Biden could offer about the stakes of the upcoming election, and a clear reminder that some of the nine justices have entered their seventies.
Clarence Thomas is 75 and Samuel Alito is 74; both are conservative and appointed by Republican presidents. Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal who was nominated by President Barack Obama, turns 70 next month.
…and the district judges themselves elect/appoint their representatives to SCotUS. Get political appointees out of the top bench, I’ll take an unelected meritocracy over cronyism and patronage any day.
I like that Idea. It doesn’t entirely solve the problem of political appointees since the lower court judges are themselves appointed, but it does provide a layer of abstraction to where the judge isn’t directly beholden to a party, in theory.
It’s not like Trump appointed hundreds of judges… right?
It would at least (in theory) kick the politicization of judges to the circuit level and promote the same borderline majority opinions there instead - but make accession to SCotUS a supermajority. Hopefully then the only ones they can agree on are outstanding jurists.
Or if it does fall prey to partisan agendas, then it makes the ideological bent of SCotUS stable-ish.