I’m not apologizing for that pun.
USICA quietly passed in the House. Score one for Secret Congress!
Revisiting Court Reform: Just one quick take here. I’ve dissed on one of the more popular SCOTUS reform plans before, the one that says “five justices for each party, then they have to agree on five more to serve with them”1. Personally, I think this is about the worst thing you can do, because it further entrenches the two-party system.
However, it occurred to me that the best principle we might extract from the proposal is the unanimity requirement. It guarantees that new justices can be agreed upon by all parties! And that gets us back to a more ideologically independent court.
The problem is, unanimity gives you the Polish Democracy problem. What if the ten partisan justices simply can’t agree on a slate? What if one games the system and holds out? Do we stipulate that they just can’t hear cases — and is that even Constitutional?
This is ultimately why I still favor the “randomize the court” plan. Confirm the entire federal appellate to SCOTUS, and then rotate them randomly every so many weeks2. The advantage here, what trumps unanimity, is unpredictability, which is what we actually care about.
Let’s say that one panel is populated with extremists. What’s to stop them from overturning Roe — or worse? Well, two weeks from now, it’s entirely possible that an equally-but-oppositely extreme panel will overturn them. It doesn’t erase every justice’s personal biases — that’s an impossible pope dream anyways. But it incentivizes them to rule in ways that they estimate the entire community of their peers will support.
For the conservatives in the room, there’s even a lot to like. For one, the federal appellate is already currently tilted towards Republican nominees. But the incentive towards consensus also tilts the system against major shifts in jurisprudence. In fact, some liberals might have something to fear in the prospect of fewer leaps like Brown, even if that’s against the context of fewer other power grabs like Dredd Scott and Citizens United.A couple weeks ago, the Argument had an astounding display of Dumb Centrism from a Frank Luntz focus group. One of the things that makes me perennially hopeful for multiparty reform is that a significant chunk of the American center is sick of the two-party system.
But one of the things that’s always depressing is hearing from the actual center. Confused ideologies are of course to be expected, but there’s more to it than that…
HOT TAKE WARNING!!!
The American center is sadly beholden to a set of memes that are criminally stupid; particularly, in that they have absolutely no realistic chance of solving the problems they complain about, let alone coherently understanding those problems, let alone having those problems accurately reflect the problems we actually have!
Take my favorite, “money in politics”. Most people dislike money in politics because it results in anti-popular outcomes. But no one would be complaining if Rod Blagojevich had tried to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat in order to help blind orphan cancer kids with AIDS. Even something less absurd like using the proceeds to fund a campaign for Medicare For All would have earned him at least some public sympathy.
The point is, a constitutional ban on “money in politics” wouldn’t magically give us a working political system. Joe Manchin would still be a moderate with sympathies and electoral cross-pressures pushing him towards the coal industry.
But that’s the meme. “Get the money out of politics!” “Sit them all down like the children they are, lock the door and have them bang out a deal!” It’s fairy-tale nonsense. Slogans. Not a coherent expression of centrist sentiments and strategy.
The American center deserves better from its leaders. I don’t think it’s reasonable to demand the center put together a coherent ideology in the same way that conservatives3, libertarians, progressives, and liberals do. Centrism just doesn’t work like that. But it is reasonable to demand that centrist politicians put together a coherent rhetoric. Think of it this way: Outside of Manchin’s rhetoric on his deficit/inflation-hawk position (which is wrong, but at least coherent), does any of his rhetoric on the filibuster, compromise, “money in politics”, or any other kind of reform actually make sense?
I think you know the answer.
Wish I could find the link here for y’all, but let’s just say it was back in the Bad Old Days on Quora, so it’s always a crapshoot for me finding my old pieces there.
2 weeks is the number I’ve seen most frequently.
Stop snickering. You know what I mean!