Rep. Jamie Raskin is one of my favorite people in public life. He's smart, brave and profoundly decent and honorable. He's dedicated to the rule of law and democracy itself. How dedicated? He buried his 25-year-old son on January 5, 2021. The next day he came to work to certify the election results.
I'm too old and cynical to have heroes but if I did have one, he'd be it.
Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, was interviewed by Dahlia Lithwick, reprinted in Slate Magazine — this is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the dangers the Supreme Court poses to democracy and some potential fixes that might save the us from the Court and the Court from itself.
First, he lays out the problems:
[The Supreme Court is] the only federal court in the land that does not have a binding ethics code. And it shows.
If you don't have an ethics code, you get people flying on junkets with their billionaire buddies all over the world and taking, you know, huge cash payments for a motor coach, a house, private school tuition. Why not? You only make, what? $325,000 a year.
Disgusting. Truly outrageous. Makes my blood boil. How is this allowed to happen?
I never thought I would live to see the day where justices have their own billionaire sugar daddies who give them houses and automobiles and private school tuitions. My friend Dar Williams sings a song where she says: "It's a long road from law to justice."
…to my mind, we've gotta organize the people in America. That's where the power comes from. And we will, if and when we win back the House and the Senate and the White House. We will look at the Supreme Court and figure out what can be done about that extremely corrupted and contaminated body.
Okay, so what solutions is he proposing?
The Constitution does not fix the numerical composition of the Supreme Court, and it has changed nine or 10 different times over the course of our history. We have 13 federal circuits. We've got nine justices. Five of those justices are from New York. We've got one for each borough. We have entire federal circuits that don't have a single justice. How about we start to talk about having 13 justices on the Supreme Court, one from each circuit, 18-year terms—they still get life tenure because they can go and be on the district bench or the circuit bench. Each president gets two appointments to the court. Obviously, the Senate still has to advise and consent, but it will remove some of the toxicity and the poison from the nominations if we know that each president will get two. We can deal with this problem, but the current Supreme Court is just a scandal.
I'm not sure how possible any of these options are in the real world, but we should be adopting all of them immediately or else the six radicals on the Court are going to set this country back decades if not centuries.
