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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

you can thank FDR for stacking the supreme court and outright threatening to increase the number of justices to intimidate other justices for that ruling. Supreme Court went with every overreach of power that FDR wanted for the federal government, including affirming the right to intern Japanese-Americans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Procedures_Reform_Bil...

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>outright threatening to increase the number of justices to intimidate other justices for that ruling

Good thing we’ve learned so much since then. You would never have anyone so short sighted as to jump up and down for that in these more civilized times.

If seriously does need to be done though. It's morbid having a single elderly person's health dictate which way a country goes.

I'd like to see one seat per circuit (13), and a term limit of 20 years.

I can get behind this.

Some countries even have several dozen supreme justices, with a new one every year or two. That would rid us of this obscene phenomenon that turns one elderly person's health issues into a disgraceful politically polarized evening news issue. It also increases the RoI of extortion and assassination.

If we're going to blame someone, why not blame the court for expanding its own power, back in 1803? SCOTUS' current role is defined nowhere in constitution (Which says next to nothing about the roles of courts), or by an act of legislature. It was, quite literally, magicked out of thin air by SCOTUS.

The role of the courts in deciding the constitutionality of legislation was very much in the zeitgeist of the American experiment. Federalist, No. 78:

> It is not otherwise to be supposed, that the Constitution could intend to enable the representatives of the people to substitute their will to that of their constituents. It is far more rational to suppose, that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority. [0]

It is absurd to say that the Supreme Court “magicked out of thin air” the notion of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison. That was simply the Court's first assertion of the power the constitution gave it to wield, the wielding of which is the primary purpose of the judiciary as a separate but equal branch of American government.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._78#Judicial_r...

Where in the constitution is that power described or given?

Article III. "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court..."

Article III, Sec. 2, clearly, which begins:

> The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution …

Let’s not continue this conversation. The view I’m presenting is long established and can be found better and much more extensively made in a great many sources which no one should have any trouble finding, should he wish. You, I infer, do not wish.

It is amazing how many people have trouble understanding that a dispute of the form “is this action the government is taking lawful, given the existence of Congressional action X and Constitutional provision Y” is case arising under the Constitution and Laws of the United States.

Yes, it’s a bit surprising. The whole point of a constitution is to provide a groundwork and a set of meta-rules governing how the ordinary rules of society may be made and modified, and how disputes about those sorts of thing should be resolved. The judiciary is precisely the mechanism for entertaining and deciding these disputes.

The odd thing, really, is that it took a decade and a half, until 1803, for the Supreme Court first to find it necessary to tell another of the other branches of government that it had broken the rules.

Not all that odd. The federal government legislated much less then, it was a drastically simpler nation. And the 14th amendment had not been adopted incorporating most of the first 10 amendments to cover state actions.

It's missing a hell of a lot of details on how the court is actually supposed to work, most conspicuously, the details that the grandparent post was railing at FDR for trying to change.

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