If you think Congress should expand the Supreme Court, please write or call and tell them.
Here’s a link to all the Senators’ contact information: https://www.270towin.com/elected-officials/contact-us-senators
Write the US Senators if you agree with the author of this article who said,
“Demand that the Supreme Court be expanded. Abolish the filibuster. Treat this like the emergency it is!”
We honor the idea of the American experiment, but we have lost the spirit of experimentation that made it work. We did not discover the ideal structure for the Supreme Court, once and for all, in 1869. Our forerunners did their best for the times in which they lived. It is time we did ours. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/10/opinion/supreme-court-biden-reform.html
Excerpts from this article:
The Court has expanded or shrunk in size seven times throughout its history ... One suggestion is Epps and Sitaraman’s idea for a “Balanced Bench.” This proposal aims to counteract the effects of partisanship.
This podcast is a conversation about why changing the size of the court (despite its controversies) has been an important tool for staving off constitutional crisis and why Kramer views Roosevelt’s infamous court-packing effort as a major success and more:
This podcast talks about some of the outrageous rulings from the Supreme Court and how it is harming our Democratic Republic.
Five Recent Outrageous SCOTUS opinions with a 6-3 vote
1. The 6 extremist justices signed onto Alito’s opinion (Roberts only signed onto part of it but his separate opinion concurs with overturning Roe). The opinion was released on June 24, 2022.
Excerpt from Alito's opinion:
The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State [he actually means the state legislators] from regulating or prohibiting abortion. … We now overrule [Roe v. Wade and Casey] those decisions …
Thomas added his own crazy opinion:
... "due process of law" merely required executive and judicial actors to comply with legislative enactments and the common law when depriving a person of life, liberty, or property. … substantive due process lacks any basis in the Constitution. … For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.
Thomas was clarifying what he thought Alito meant in this part of Alito's opinion for the Court:
the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition
Alito's interpretation of the 14th amendment is outrageous! The 14th Amendment reads in part:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Here’s part of Robert’s opinion:
Let me begin with my agreement with the Court, on the only question we need decide here: whether to retain the rule from Roe and Casey that a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy extends up to the point that the fetus is regarded as “viable” outside the womb. I agree that this rule should be discarded. …
Excerpts from the dissent:
JUSTICE BREYER, JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, and JUSTICE KAGAN, dissenting.
For half a century, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992), have protected the liberty and equality of women. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that in the first stages of pregnancy, the government could not make that choice for women. The government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life: It could not determine what the woman’s future would be. Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions.
2. This opinion was released June 21, 2022
ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court, in which THOMAS, ALITO, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT joined.
BREYER, filed a dissenting opinion, in which KAGAN joined, and in which SOTOMAYOR joined as to all but Part I–B. Part of the dissent:
The First Amendment begins by forbidding the government from making any law respecting an establishment of religion. ... The [six justices on the] Court today pay almost no attention to the words in the first Clause
3. This opinion was released May 16, 2022
ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court, in which THOMAS, ALITO, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT joined.
KAGAN filed a dissenting opinion, in which BREYER and SOTOMAYOR joined.
Part of the dissent:
A candidate for public office extends a $500,000 loan to his campaign organization, hoping to recoup the amount from benefactors’ post-election contributions. Once elected, he devotes himself assiduously to recovering the money; his personal bank account, after all, now has a gaping half-million-dollar hole. The politician solicits donations from wealthy individuals and corporate lobbyists, making clear that the money they give will go straight from the campaign to him, as repayment for his loan. He is deeply grateful to those who help, as they know he will be—more grateful than for ordinary campaign contributions (which do not increase his personal wealth). And as they paid him, so he will pay them. In the coming months and years, they receive government benefits—maybe favorable legislation, maybe prized appointments, maybe lucrative contracts. The politician is happy; the donors are happy. The only loser is the public. It inevitably suffers from government corruption. The campaign finance measure at issue here has for two decades checked the crooked exchanges just described. The provision, Section 304 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, prohibited a candidate from using post-election donations to repay loans exceeding $250,000. … In striking down the law today, the [six justices on the] Court greenlights all the sordid bargains Congress thought right to stop. The theory of their decision [to strike down the law] is hard to fathom.
4. Thomas included in his opinion for New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, that “any modern instruments that facilitate armed self-defense” are also protected under the Constitution, even if they did not exist until recently. … [despite the fact] modern technology has made guns vastly more powerful and deadly, and the exponential growth in population creates new challenges that were not present hundreds of years ago. …What happens when the people are no longer allowed to protect themselves from mass slaughter through their elected representatives and are left at the mercy of unelected judges who do not care if they are shot to death?
5. Another 6 to 3 ruling that ignores the establishment clause.
KENNEDY v. BREMERTON SCHOOL DIST.
ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS, ALITO, and BARRETT, JJ., joined, and in which KAVANAUGH, J., joined, except as to Part III–B. THOMAS, J., and ALITO, J., filed concurring opinions. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which BREYER and KAGAN, JJ., joined
Excerpts from dissent:
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE BREYER and JUSTICE KAGAN join, dissenting.
This case is about whether a public school must permit a school official to kneel, bow his head, and say a prayer at the center of a school event. The Constitution does not au- thorize, let alone require, public schools to embrace this conduct. Official-led prayer strikes at the core of our constitutional protections for the religious liberty of students and their parents, as embodied in both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The Court now charts a different path, yet again paying almost exclusive attention to the Free Exercise Clause’s protection for individual religious exercise while giving short shrift to the Establishment Clause’s prohibition on state establishment of religion
Here’s the link to the Supreme Court’s website where they post opinions as they are released: https://www.supremecourt.gov/
