The Senate and Supreme Court are Broken. Stop Trying to Save Them and Fix Them Instead.

[Nevilledog]

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David Atkins
@DavidOAtkins
The Senate and the Supreme Court are broken. They cannot be saved. They can only be fixed.

And GOP authoritarians are playing Democratic institutionalists trying to "save" the Senate and the Court for suckers.

My latest @monthly:
Supreme Court
The Senate and Supreme Court are Broken. Stop Trying to Save Them and Fix Them Instead.
Go beyond the hot takes and the emotional headlines about the Senate, the Supreme Court and American democracy, and you'll see the contours of a deeper argument play out among analysts of good faith....
washingtonmonthly.com
4:13 PM · Jul 3, 2021

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/07/03/the-senate-and-supreme-court-are-broken-stop-trying-to-save-them-and-fix-them-instead/

Go beyond the hot takes and the emotional headlines about the Senate, the Supreme Court and American democracy, and you’ll see the contours of a deeper argument play out among analysts of good faith.

On one side are the Institutionalists and on the other are the Realists. The Institutionalists see the way American government is designed to work and want to keep it functioning as well as possible under that framework. The Realists see the way these institutions actually work in practice, and want to both reform them accordingly and adapt the tactics of responsible legislators to save democracy. The Realists are right. The Institutionalists are wrong.

This topic deserves a book-length treatment–one well beyond the patience of either the reader or the writer on this holiday Saturday afternoon. But the outline of the argument is simple enough to understand.

Institutionalists argue that the Senate and the Supreme Court cannot function as intended if they are aggressively partisan bodies. The Court will increasingly lack legitimacy in the eyes of one faction or another, its decisions will become increasingly warped by politics, and pressure will increase to make the court more quickly and reliably reflect the partisan composition of the American body politic as reflected by the winners of recent elections. If the Court is seen as merely an unelected partisan legislature, then the entire concept of judicial review will come under fire as unnecessary and illegitimate. So, the Institutionalists argue, it is important to make the Court as anti-partisan as possible to avoid these outcomes.

*snip*

[AllaN01Bear]

1. my thoughts on this subject from an earlier post.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=15582489

[Hoyt]

2. Think voters are the best, and quickest, way to do that.

[quakerboy]

4. They did do that

Multiple times.

But certain elected Dems ain't listening any more this time than they did last time, or the time before, or the time before.

[msongs]

3. then there are the saboteurs who see how they can block things and be powerful no matter how

much it damages the nation and its people

[Rhiannon12866]

5. Twitter reply:

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