It's quite a damning indictment of US-style democracy that people trust a small cabal of unelected lifetime appointees without any meaningful oversight, over a larger pool of democratically elected officials.
One thing that makes SCOTUS interesting is that they have no enforcement mechanism. It's mainly only tradition and respect for the institution that causes people to follow Supreme Court rulings. If the executive branch suddenly decided to do whatever it wanted, as long as they had support within their own ranks, including the military, there'd be no one to stop them.
On the flip side, this means that SCOTUS has a huge incentive to do their best to figure out what the actual right thing is, and rule that way. Because if too many people think SCOTUS is a shady group of individuals whose rulings are arbitrary and don't deserve respect, that's it for their power. And that's why even when I believe one of their rulings to be counter to my values, I can usually understand why they came to the decision they made, and at least respect the process.
> I'm not sure what that would look like.
Just iterating a few possibilities:
1) Lifetime terms (like Roman senate or SCOTUS)
2) Term limits (like US Pres)
Honestly really naive about political theory and I wonder what the case is for each and what the process for changing would look like (guessing it is something congress would have to do, so hard to do).
You're underselling this, I think.
It is "respect for the institution" why the military accepts the civilian authority of the POTUS as commander in chief. If we are only considering the ability to use violence to enforce one's position as legitimate, it's the military and police forces who rule. Once you factor in laws, the SCOTUS is authoritative as to how the laws can be legally interpreted.
"In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the name of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me – who lives and who dies?”
The more interesting question to me than "who lives and who dies?" is "who holds the most power?" The three great men have enormous resources to influence the sellsword, but in this situation isn't it the sellsword ultimately making the decision and being the agent of change? Does the military let POTUS pretend he has ultimate power, or does "respect for the institution" really overpower the military?
I really hope "respect for institution" is more powerful than our military. I think so far we've seen that it is, but the current administration seems to be attacking our institutions pretty aggressivly.
A huge portion of the military really comes down to who has money to keep paying the soldiers, fueling the bombers etc. If the military revolts but no one ends up paid, a problem ensues.
Who would hear a legal case against the SCOTUS?
I'm almost certain most people doing these graphics know exactly how to draw a graph, it's just that their audience has made it clear that they like incorrect graphs, so long as they reinforce existing beliefs.
Someone, somewhere, has almost certainly done an A/B test of "correct graph" versus "misleading graph" and learned that the latter produces more clicks, shares and revenue.
One approach to splitting things might look something like this:
government A: education, taxes, social services, abortion, immigration, ...
government B: electoral issues, telecom/internet, mail, privacy, utilities, workplace regulations, ... basically, mundane areas that are more about boring competence and finding smart solutions. Or at the very least, serving the public will more directly.
This way, the boring yet important stuff can be done by B without being drowned out by the divisive stuff in A, where people become polarized into thinking they just need to vote against particular issues and there's no real accountability for the rest of it.
You might think that state-level government provides more accountability by being smaller, and this is true in some way, but for the most part I see the exact same thing happening where state government elections are mostly not providing much accountability in a lot of government domains because they aren't contentious enough to be the deciding factors in elections. But they are still important nevertheless.
"It's quite a damning indictment of US-style democracy that people distrust a larger pool of democratically elected officials over a small cabal of unelected lifetime appointees without any meaningful oversight"
You're framing it like Congress is elected by the people and are thus more worthy of their trust and the fact that doesn't happen is the damning part. But that's one-sided.
In reality there's a TON of special interests driving who gets in front of the population to even be elected to Congress and then what the agenda is for them after being elected. That erodes the public's trust, not to mention all the Congressional scandals over the years and the cutthroat tactics politicians will do to simply get re-elected.
So I see the same conclusion as you but in reverse.
There aren't really. In other countries yes, the party can kick you out if they don't like you. In the US the parties don't really exist, there are just people.
There have been tons of primary upsets just this week and none of them are because of "special interests". No elite wants Jamaal Bowman or Lauren Boebert elected, but they'll be on the ballot.
Afterwards the control is mostly because we don't fund elections properly, so everyone except AOC has to spend all day calling donors.
"Corporations Lobbying Government Reap 76,000% Return On Investment. Between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America’s most politically active corporations spent a combined $5.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions." [1]
"How The Fortune 100 Turned $2 Billion in Lobbying Spend Into $400 Billion of Taxpayer Cash" [2]
[1] https://www.mintpressnews.com/corporations-lobbying-governme...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/05/14/how...
Regarding who gets on the ballot - yes there are a special interests that fund their candidate. We generally get whomever has a larger budget, not who the best candidate might be. Special interests also drive the ballot measures too.
> In the US the parties don't really exist, there are just people.
This makes no sense. Just recently (2016) the Dems showed clear bias against Bernie in the leaks. The Chair resigned. The party always has a platform, a brand, an agenda and big budgets. Also third parties have almost zero shot because the 2 major parties conspire to keep them out. It's not just "people". The Ds have their consistent supporters and the Rs have theirs. That includes corporations, special interest groups and more.
You have non-citizens driving these politicians. Big donors, some unions (like police), special interest groups. Health care, gun lobbyists, etc.
"Analyst James A. Thurber estimated that the actual number of working lobbyists was close to 100,000 and that the industry brings in $9 billion annually.[6] Wall Street spent a record $2 billion trying to influence the 2016 United States presidential election." [1]
"Who got special deals in the stimulus and why they got them. In the $2 trillion package, senators took care of their home state industries and pet projects." [2]
Casinos and airlines, among others, flexed their clout in that stimulus.
From the homepage today: "AP: Catholic Church lobbied for taxpayer funds, got $1.4B" [4]
Even more damning:
"We looked for legislation that was written by special interests. We found it in all 50 states. When legislators propose new laws, they don’t always write the bills themselves. Corporations, interest groups or their lobbyists often write fill-in-the-blank documents then shop them to state lawmakers."
"These copy-and-paste bills are commonly known as model legislation. More than 2,100 of these bills have been signed into law in the last eight years." [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/26/stimulus-coronaviru...
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/asbestos-sharia-...
I mean, evidence suggests this is not true because of the small-donor revolution. Like I said above, there were left and right primary upsets this week, and now senior House members will probably be replaced by a socialist high school teacher and a Qanon conspiracy theorist.
Meanwhile in the presidential race, Bernie raised the most with only small donors, two billionaires outspent everyone and failed, and Biden is winning despite hardly fundraising or advertising the whole primary.
Another new case is in Seattle, where Amazon tried to spend their way into controlling the city council to get rid of a tax, but only proved they had no power and everyone hated them: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/07/jumpstart-seatt...
The less popular congresspeople who don't have as many small donors do spend too much time calling for donations, so reform is still needed, but AOC and co really do seem to not have this problem.
> This makes no sense. Just recently (2016) the Dems showed clear bias against Bernie in the leaks. The Chair resigned. The party always has a platform, a brand, an agenda and big budgets.
And in 2020 because Bernie had such a strong youth vote (even though he ran a kind of bad campaign this time), Biden moved to the left after winning and put his people on the policy team. Probably the reason he didn't win is that old people who own homes are the most reliable voters - they're the real interest behind everything in the US.
> "Who got special deals in the stimulus and why they got them. In the $2 trillion package, senators took care of their home state industries and pet projects." [2]
I read this article and idk, seems fine to me. It would be quite bad if the airlines went out of business; they have some of the largest union contracts in the US and those would not survive bankruptcy.
You're trying to make a case based on just a handful of candidates.
You missed the whole point on Bernie - which was that the party showed clear bias.
What about the model legislation I linked to? Special interests and corporations creating thousands of bills.
* Inherited peers who were supposed to be abolished or at least phased out but then weren't either, just statistically they'll tend to be older and have also inherited riches so while a few are knowledgeable and add value most aren't even decorative. Some of these are just a drain on the purse, they show up to collect "expenses" but don't actually do anything whatsoever. But others insist on having their say even if they nothing to offer.
* Politicians sent there. No better than they were when (or if, some had previously been in high ranking unelected positions) elected. Some of these serve as Ministers. Unlike the US the British cabinet must be selected from Parliament, all the Great Offices (most important) must by tradition comes from the Commons and thus elected MPs. But it's normal (and when your talent pool is a bit empty necessary) to have a bunch of Cabinet Ministers from the Lords. You can deliberately "elevate" people there because you want them for this purpose but as it's a lifetime deal they are still there until they die. The alternative, if someone seems electable, is to "parachute them in" to replace a retiring or dead MP from your party in a by-election, but this is a less certain way and usually much slower.
* Rich people who thought this sounded interesting. In principle you can't buy a place in the Lords. In practice if you are rich enough it's definitely possible though you may look very desperate in the process, particularly if you're in such a hurry that you must be lobby different groups as power shifts from one year to the next.
* Do Gooders. These people at least didn't really set out to be in the Lords and thus could be the voice of the ordinary person. Except they tend to be pretty exceptional - for example the 1980s children's TV presenter Floella Benjamin was made a Baroness, but that's after not only being probably one of the few black women lots of very white children in England saw (on TV) from one week to the next in their childhood but also a lifetime of charitable work.
The best of the Lords are when some expert (say, a person who worked as a General Practitioner seeing NHS patients for four decades before arriving in the Lords) tells the rest of the Lords how things are, and they realise they've just been schooled and vote accordingly. Lords are not required to have a party affiliation (technically neither are the Commons but you're basically useless without one there). So-called "Cross benchers" are common, and relatively powerful.
* A bunch of actual Bishops. They probably shouldn't be there these days, and they mostly stay out of the way because they know that too, but for now they still are. When the Lords was created it made sense to have Bishops. There also used to be Judges, but those are now across the road in the independent Supreme Court.
The Lords often end up doing a lot of the "good" stuff you see the Senate doing. Dragging powerful people in to explain themselves on camera; actually reading the paperwork that the Commons was in too much of a hurry to get out the door and noticing all the horrible technical mistakes. "Did you mean to miss six year olds out for some reason? Or is this age mismatch between paragraphs 16b and 16c a typo?". That sort of thing.
Really what I meant was that I trust the supreme court more specifically on the question of whether a body might use a loophole to achieve a political end. I trust Congress less on that because they're a political body and so will naturally pursue political ends. The Supreme Court is at least nominally apolitical, so I trust them to have a bit more restraint on that particular front. The job of a Congressperson is to fight for what they believe should be the law, and I trust them to do that. But that also means I don't trust them to avoid using a loophole to win that fight.
It's therefore a big reach to call the Supreme Court a "cabal".
This could not be further from the truth. Complete audio recordings and transcripts dating back to 1955 are available on oyez.org, the more recent of which are likewise available on the Court's own website. During non-pandemic operation, the Court hearings are open to the public. For the cases argued during the pandemic shutdown, the hearings were, in fact, livestreamed.
You can hear the justices trying on different lines of reasoning for size during these arguments. So in a very real sense, we get to see a lot of their decision-making process.
Yes, they hold a private conference at which some discussion and the vote takes place. I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't want any of the justices to face social pressure in that moment.
> hundreds of pages in reasoning as to why they made the decision
This reads as an argument against the position that the Court is secretive.
There was a contentious period during the great depression where FDR threatened to pack the court. A serious infringement on what is supposed to be an impartial court.