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Comment by mrd3v0 | Hacker News Reader

The entire 'rhetoric' you are dismissing by illogically implying bad motivations is crticising the US Supreme Court for being undemocratic. As someone who is not American, a court with judges, appointed by an undemocratic, lost-by-popular-vote twice-impeached former president, making rulings that are at odds with many polls out there, including a ruling that reverses protections from sexist laws, is incredibly undemocractic.

I honestly have no words for anyone looking at these facts and still think there need not change in the very flawed democracy of the USA.

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Whether they lost the popular vote is not really that relevant as that's not the basis of elections. They were elected to the presidency, therefore they got to make appointments. And I'm not sure the Supreme Court should be considering what polls say on most subjects if they're ruling on matters of law.

Anyway while I think there is some merit in having judicial appointments which won't/can't be undone by the next administration I think the whole lifetime serving thing seems...unwise. 16 years would seem like a decently long tenure. 36 years is the current record and Clarence Thomas may well beat that if he's not somehow done in for corruption.

Given how heated US politics is becoming (in rhetoric anyway) it's only a matter of time until the justices require presidential level security teams.

> Anyway while I think there is some merit in having judicial appointments which won't/can't be undone by the next administration I think the whole lifetime serving thing seems...unwise.

The “in good behavior” thing wouldn’t be problematic if the accountability mechanism wasn’t hopely broken in the case of partisan wrongdoing serving either one of the major parties. (IOW, like many problems in the US government, what is broken is ultimately FPTP elections and the resulting partisan duopoly.)

>As someone who is not American, a court with judges, appointed by an undemocratic, lost-by-popular-vote twice-impeached former president,

In the USA, Supreme Court judges are nominated by a president (who was elected by through a process of representative democracy), but confirmed (closest to appointed) by a democratically elected Senate.

>making rulings that are at odds with many polls out there

The majority of SCOTUS rulings are bipartisan and non-controversial, but let's say we ignore those and focus narrowly on the ones with some controversy around them. The New York Times[0], a left-leaning and anti-Trump institution has identified 12 cases over this past year as "major decisions" and has compiled a page where you can see how the court ruled, and how the public polled. If you read it, you'll see that the Supreme Court diverged from public opinion on only 2 of those 12 cases.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/07/us/major-supr...

Furthermore, the underlying premise that the Supreme Court should be bound by public opinion is democratic only in the most literal sense and would quickly lead to tyranny of the majority.

So I guess I stand with OP - the fact that you, a "non-American" are convinced that what you wrote are "facts" is soft evidence of there being a deliberate effort to undermine faith in the legal system.

One of the principle ideas for the existence of the court is that it would make “rulings that are at odds with many polls”. It’s one of several interlocking mechanisms that’s supposed to protect us from popular democracy. Of course, there’s a lot of venal corruption on the current court, and for a long time, perhaps forever, it has failed to live up to its purpose, making rulings that are clearly motivated by politics rather than law. That’s another set of issues.

The failure is with our disgusting legislators who have abdicated their responsibilities and let that weight fall on the courts

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