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Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), god love him, has been busy this week. First he decided to be the only person in Washington to try to get some answers about Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s multibillion Saudi (and Qatari, and UAE-y, and the guy from Foxconn … y) graft.
PREVIOUSLY! AS IN JUST TODAY!
And now he’s introduced a federal judiciary reform bill that could fix many of the problems that have led to widespread distrust of the US Supreme Court. Not that it has even a chance of passing our current hellcongress with its Republican House and filibuster-bedraggled Senate. But both of those conditions could change, so let’s take a look at what Wyden’s proposing, just in case. It’s a little different from the reforms Joe Biden endorsed earlier this year, but hey, good to have a big menu to choose from.
As the Washington Post explains (gift link), the biggest change Wyden proposes is expansion of the court to 15 members, over the course of 12 years so that no single party is likely to bogart all the new justices and make things worse. Once the law is in effect, the next few presidents could appoint new justices in the first and third years of their terms.
But Wyden’s just getting started. To prevent sudden shifts in the law like we’ve seen from the Alito Court just making shit up (major questions “doctrine” my ass!), the Supremes, and federal appeals courts, would have to have a two-thirds majority on any ruling that overturns a law passed by Congress. Observers note that this would mean “desecrating the flag” would still be illegal, and DOMA would still be the law. They like the rest of the proposal better!
Like this one: To prevent fuckery of the sort that Mitch McConnell perpetrated to block Barack Obama from appointing a replacement for Dead Antonin Scalia, the bill would require an automatic vote on Supreme Court nominees if a nomination is stuck in committee more than 180 days.
To ensure cases don’t take forever to make their way through the courts, the bill also expands the number of federal circuits from 13 to 15, which would add “more than 100 district court judges and more than 60 appellate-level judges,” and also give triskaidekaphobes one less thing to worry about. Ooh, and there’d be one circuit for each SCOTUS justice, which seems pleasantly symmetrical and which in fact used to be the practice.
Also, to address the bizarre and increasing use of the anonymous shadow docket in “emergency” decisions, justices would be required to reveal how they voted in such decisions. Transparency, fuckers.
And then there’s some nice ethics stuff, too, like toughening up the financial disclosures justices must make and requiring an annual IRS audit of each justice’s taxes … and say, was that the sound of a super-expensive motorhome peeling rubber just now? Stop him before he gets to the border! Nominees to be on the Supreme Court would have to disclose three years of tax returns, too.
To prevent raging hypocrisy like, we dunno, a justice ruling on a case their spouse advocated loudly about, or flying flags supporting the defendants, members of the Court could force a colleague to recuse via a two-thirds vote. We do hope Wyden included some sort of guardrails to prevent the six current Republican justices from routinely forcing recusals by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, because you know they would deploy it as automatically as Mitch McConnell employs the filibuster.
We like a lot of these changes, and even if the whole package doesn’t pass (it won’t), Wyden says he would like to at least pass parts of it on an à la carte basis, which would also require a saner Congress.
We should do something about that, for sure.
OPEN THREAD.
[WaPo (gift link) / Photo: Joe Frazier, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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