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Comment by hnfong | Hacker News Reader

Given that judiciary being subservient to the Party is an intentional feature in China, no competent western system would do "worse" in judicial independence than China.

The GP is literally always correct in relativistic terms. If that makes people in the West feel more comfortable with the government, I guess I could say good for them? :)

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The Supreme Court itself is a partisan institution, now more than ever, and every reading of the Constitution has been subject to partisan biases since forever. That's not to say we have no checks and balances, just that they are not independent. More like interdependent and part of a vicious cycle; biased legislators appoint biased judges who exonerate biased executives who reward biased legislators. I think the cycles of the last few years have made that abundantly clear, but any cursory reading of US history should reveal this is not a new pattern. It's just how the system has always worked, our folklore notwithstanding.

If you don't think life appointment makes someone politically independent, I have to wonder what possible office would qualify. Divine monarch? Fürher?

Does your ideology radically change over your life? Why would theirs? They judge with their own biases, and are often out of touch with public sentiment. They're just people, and in case of at least one, a rapist with powerful friends.

A bigger court elected by the people could help solve that problem. Not lifetime appointments with zero accountability. The Supremes are just another fascist and anti democratic institution, like the electoral college or the party apparatuses.

You have a very peculiar view of language if you think that elected officials are less political than ones that are appointed for life.

Lifetime appointments just mean they get to force THEIR politics on the rest of us, instead of being accountable to ours. It doesn't make them magically apolitical. They are partisan hacks appointed by shitty legislators elected by an antiquated electoral system participated in by a disenchanted and uneducated mass. The Supreme Court doesn't have a great track record of being some sort of enlightened wise guru above the fray, they're very much a part of the broken model of American representative democracy and its inability to cope with the issues of modernity.

(sorry, new account BTW, lost the last password)

And if we're arguing semantics, there is a tendency for conservatives to label "things done differently than before" as "political" and the status quo as the sane default, which it rarely is to anyone not in line with their ideology. Everything in civic life is political, especially in a democracy as ragged and divided as ours. The more precise question, I think, is not whether some person or institution is "political" (they are, unavoidably, especially if they don't even see their own politics) but whether they are responsive to democratic whims. The Supreme Court by design is way less so, vs the House say. And I'd argue that's a huge part of their problem. Society and needs didn't evolve as quickly when that institution was designed. It simply cannot keep up. 9 old farts who don't understand technology have no place governing the future of 300 million.

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