Now that I am back (somewhat) I can finish off the last two in the
series of fixing democracy. So let us continue.
Appointing Judges and Term Limits: At current Supreme Court Judges are
appointed by the President and ratified by the Senate. This was meant to
be a check on the system as the Senate represented the State Governments and
not the people directly. So it prevented the President from stacking the
court in their favor with respect to issues of State sovereignty and people’s
rights. But now it is all about party politics. Presidents use
"litmus tests" to determine the most appointable judge that best
represents their ideological viewpoints. Kind of degrading to the nation
isn't it? As our supreme court is degraded into a tool of the Party
Politics system. So what can be done about this? Simple, change the
rules.
To eliminate this corruption via the
political machine, you first have to eliminate the traditional method of
appointing judges. So rather than a president appointing them, they will
be chosen via the same method one would choose a member of a jury. In
this case, standards would be set demanding that any judge who may serve must be
a practicing lawyer, or judge with at least one year of service. This
eliminates people who have law degrees but have never been inside a courtroom
(Justice Kagan being a prime example of a person who never saw time in court,
but was appointed anyway). So with that limitation we make sure people
who actually know law and understand how it is implemented are the ones
serving. At this point the currently serving judges would look at the
potential candidates and give their top 20 list from which the Senate would
pick and ratify a number equal to the number of open positions on the Supreme
Court. If none of the candidates in the list make the cut, then the Supreme
Court would provide another list eliminating the bottom candidates and adding
new ones. This process (like the current one) would continue until both
sides are satisfied.
Now, we do not want justices serving
perpetually, and thus they will be limited to a maximum of three six year terms
with a max total of 18 Judges. As such, 1/3 of the judges will be changed
or reappointed every two years. This insures that potentially bad judges
do not stay in office for an extended period of time (current judges serve as
long as they please as they have no limits on the number of years served). Additionally
the number of judges needed to sit on any given case will be a minimum of three
and a maximum of nine but the number must always be an odd number. This allows
the judges to see multiple cases at once, but if a case should return to the Supreme
Court for any reason, the judges from the previous case will not be allowed to
sit on that case. This prevents conflicts of interest. As such with this
in place we eliminate judges not wanting to retire due to political reasons
like ideology.
Conclusion: By limiting the Court to choosing
its own replacements with select criteria, we eliminate some of the party
politics (partly because the lawyers and judges have a mindset that things can
only be done within the law). If combined with Issue 729's set criteria
on reviewing a case, then we may have a judiciary that would never allow for
something like Obama Care, or Kilo Versus New London ever again.
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