this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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There really is nothing anybody in power can do. He’s a Supreme Court justice. Appointment for life. The only ways for him to vacate his position is to die or to be impeached. This means that not only would the House have to impeach him, but more importantly, the Senate would have to convict and remove him; by a two-thirds majority, no less.
With the current spread in both the house and senate, you’d be better off becoming an expat.
They can stack the court if they get a majority in both (which would increase election chances since you'd be giving people hope they won't live in a theocracy ruled an unelected supreme council. Fuck we're even less democratic than Iran on paper.), they can marginalize the court by very publicly refusing to enforce their rulings, they can have them assassinated.
The alternative is expecting to win every single election for the next 40 years or so until they die of natural causes. And then being willing to ban the filibuster to actually get a dem pick in.
There’s the rub: the republicans stacked the courts, which is how we got to where we are now. They did it even when the democrats had majority rule. The dems, on the other hand, are pretty much too scatterbrained to organize on the level necessary to pull that shit off. I’m really surprised (and impressed) that they got 278 democrats to pass that discharge petition. That was monumental, especially for the democrats.
A tactic FDR used was threatening to add justices to the court. That's what's meant by stacking the court.
The threat was enough to get them to do what he wanted, since they realized they could either go along with him, or go against it and be marginalized since they have no actual power to enforce their rulings.
What you're basically saying, which has been true for some time now, is that our government no longer functions as it was meant to function. All of those protections were put into place to keep individuals or small groups from seizing power. It seems the forefathers never anticipated that a strong majority would be in favor of overthrowing democracy. Or maybe they just figured that if a strong majority was in favor of it, then so be it. If that's the case then I guess it's operating exactly as it was intended to function.
30-40% is not a strong majority, they are just overrepresented thanks to a lot of those "safeguards" the founding fathers put in place. 2 senators per state, electoral college, first past the post, the concept of a supermajority needed for many things of note to even get done all mean that 30% of the electorate can hold the majority by the balls if they are rural landowners whose goals align well with obstructionism