Biden tilts at windmills for his last six months
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I am against term limits, both for Supreme Court and also for Congress. I would rather see an upper age limit.
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@Mik said in Biden tilts at windmills for his last six months:
By today’s standards, perhaps. But what they created is quite remarkable to this day.
Undoubtedly so, but there's no need to deify them or imply that what they created cannot be improved upon.
If there's an argument against having a code of conduct or term limits for justices, then by all means make it. But just saying 'The Founders didn't want them and they loved freedom' is no kind of argument at all.
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Biden tilts at windmills for his last six months:
are terms limits and a Code of Conduct such a bad idea?
The founding fathers liked freedom.
A lot of people still do.
But the number of people willing to trade freedom for safety is probably growing.
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With today’s rollout of a Court-packing-lite scheme to force the three most senior conservative justices off the Supreme Court, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are proposing their own January 6 for the court system. It’s the most dangerous policy proposal by an American president since the Second World War. Harris is pledging her campaign to it, so the question will be squarely on the ballot this fall. Anyone who repeats the partisan propaganda of calling this “court reform” should resign his job as a journalist. David Garner of the Daily Beast actually gets the headline right: “Kamala Harris Goes to War on Supreme Court and Backs Term Limits.”
This isn’t “saving democracy” but destroying it. If we saw this in any other country in the world — a president frustrated with rulings of his country’s top court trying to remove the judges — we’d call it the authoritarian coup that it is. Remember the massive protests, covered lovingly by the American press, when Benjamin Netanyahu tried to rein in the power of the Israeli Supreme Court? And that was responding to a court that has no constitutional powers to overrule its parliament. Biden and Harris are proposing a far more dramatic break with American history and law than anything Netanyahu did.
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The White House fact sheet on Biden’s proposal claims, in language repeated in a Biden op-ed in the Washington Post:
Congress approved term limits for the Presidency over 75 years ago, and President Biden believes they should do the same for the Supreme Court. The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court Justices. Term limits would help ensure that the Court’s membership changes with some regularity; make timing for Court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary; and reduce the chance that any single Presidency imposes undue influence for generations to come. President Biden supports a system in which the President would appoint a Justice every two years to spend eighteen years in active service on the Supreme Court.
First of all, it’s misleading to say that Congress limited presidential terms; it passed a proposed amendment to the Constitution (requiring a two-thirds majority in both Houses), which was ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures. It’s also tendentious to compare this to the 22nd Amendment, which restored a norm of two-term presidencies that dated back to George Washington and had just been violated by Franklin D. Roosevelt immediately before the amendment was proposed.
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Whole lot of noise, with no chance of it happening. Allows President Biden and VP Harris say things on the campaign.
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@Mik said in Biden tilts at windmills for his last six months:
Pretty much. Come see me when you establish term limits for Congress.
The NRO article alludes to that.
IIRC, there was a push for that years ago (may have been in Illinois, but the point stands) and the (Illinois?) Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.
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I think NY and California should sign onto the Convention of States, and we can hash it out…
