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I am reassured in that when I heard him saber rattling about "reform" of the court I thought he meant packing.
As for the substance of it, 1 can be argued but is a question of constitutional taste, I like powerful executives personally. 3 is a complete non starter that would undermine the entire constitutional order and put the people who rule on such ethics in charge of the judiciary. Impeachment exists already, just because you can't get people to agree with you that Thomas ought to be removed doesn't mean you get to or ought to change the rules.
2 is more interesting, but it also undermines the intention of stability behind the court, and much like removing a senate or any other institution based on seniority, makes change easier and therefore institutions more vulnerable to the danger of fads which is an ever present feature of democracy.
The power analysis is more straightforward as always: the court is a rival castle and must be brought in line because originalism is in the way of what dems like Biden want. And this is just building more precedent to try and do it.
The concern on #3 is like asking "who judges the judge of the judges" which is accurate and also makes me chuckle. I don't think it's entirely impossible, but it would need some more thought than it has currently received, and I think a well-written ethics policy could be fairly robust to manipulation.
If I were to summarize my entire political ideology, opposition to this statement may be a good start. With due respect.
My default assumption is if the means and motive to abuse something exist, someone (government or otherwise) will attempt to abuse it (and usually succeed).
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"this ethics policy has been ruled robust to manipulation by the Harvard school of government committee for Progressing Public Policy. Conspiracy theories claiming without evidence that the ethics policy will be abused have been determined to be unethical and will be punished harshly by the ethics review board"
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Term limits set by Congress might not even be Constitutional. And it would be the Supreme Court’s job to determine if it is.
Does SCOTUS get to rule on the constitutionality of amendments? I guess they're still in charge of interpreting them at the end of the day, but my understanding was always that you're perfectly allowed to do unconstitutional things if you properly amend the constitution in this way.
Of course if we get to that level of antagonism between branches it raises to a constitutional crisis and violence would ultimately resolve it rather than legalism at that point.
The proposal only had 1 as a constitutional amendment, not 2 and 3.
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I should add that my answer earlier applies to what you asked but not what was originally brought up -- Congress is sorta-mostly allowed to determine various things about how the Supreme Court is implemented (famously, the size is not actually specified anywhere). Whether or not Congress is allowed to meddle with things like term limits and size without using an actual amendment is an open question that last time (FDR's court packing) ended up being dodged after public outcry.
Notably, the effort died in the Senate itself partially at the hands of his own party (and the main legislator dying of a heart attack), after being pushed by the president as the originator not Congress itself, so we never got the showdown. Also, the original rationale was to add extras for each justice over age 70 largely due to them having a caseload that was too large, but this claim about caseload was strongly refuted. Of course, it was buried even deeper because the SC did in fact rule in FDR's favor in a few key cases soon after... but whether this was the swing justice caving to fear about court packing, or other reasons, was never fully settled at the time or by historians since.
So yeah. Open question. Might work. Probably not, due to politics. It would trigger at least some form of crisis though.
Also, remember that the earliest Supreme Court was often a traveling court and didn't even work together all of the time, and didn't take the constitutional review role for themselves for another decade. With that said, virtually everyone thought it was a good idea and has been somewhat retconned in some way into the Constitutional lore (checks and balances was a big thing but my understanding is judicial review itself wasn't quite explicit). So the omission of a few key points about how the Court would work, and some of the related checks, is somewhat understandable in that light.
Term limits would probably be struck down, without an amendment—the constitution specifies that they serve "on good behavior", which is implicitly a life term.
To what extent the Supreme Court can review the constitution is an interesting question. People often read Marbury as an assumption of judicial power, but Michael Stokes Paulsen has argued, fairly compellingly, that what they described there was both necessary, and not exclusive to the judiciary—all branches of the government, at least in all offices that take the oath, are bound to interpret and uphold the constitution. Hence Lincoln was correct in his refusal to recognize Dred Scott—it was wrong; the supreme court only decides the meaning of the constitution as appled to the particular case or controversy in question (in that case, Dred Scott himself), and he as the executive has the duty to follow the constitution as he sees it.
I think this probably matches how Thomas and Gorsuch think the court should act.
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Theoretically, no, not really. The Constitution declined to put limits in place on what exactly could and could not be amended. There has been a smattering of attention here and there about a what-if scenario about how an amendment might be ruled unconstitutional if it substantially altered something fundamental about the system as a whole (like replacing it all whole cloth with a dictatorship) but the reality is that the threshold for amendments is set so high that such a ruling would be highly, highly unlikely to overturn the will of the people (and from a pure power perspective, even more unlikely -- the state and national governments basically is the government, not the judiciary, at the end of the day). One other narrow but related issue is can you amend the amendment process itself? But the answers are similar. Especially given that technically major parts of SCOTUS' judicial review power is itself the result of SCOTUS' own taking of the role (Marbury v Madison), at least philosophically, which weakens SCOTUS' argument even if they were to advance one.
The one major exception to this is the Constitution stipulates that you can't take a specific state's representation away unless they say it's okay. That is, you can't "un-state" a state even if you meet the amendment requirements. The argument about that one is slightly more up for debate.
My understanding is other countries have to confront this problem more directly in some cases specifically because they lack the high threshold we do.
There is a specific cause of action that individual states can bring which boils down to “we entered the Union under certain guarantees, and this legislation violates those guarantees.” So changing the Senate to proportional representation or something similar that would screw over small states, or changing the separation of powers might fall under that. That said, at a Constitutional convention you could theoretically do anything, even repeal the Constitution and dissolve the United States.
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