And what exactly is there to stop the opposition from doing the same thing?
Process. The same that that puts barriers on this discussion from AOC. The entire impeachment process is the understanding of the people who created this country, to have a political process that is departed from the legal process. That’s why being impeached doesn’t also mean criminally convicted and vice versa. Historically, if you were a vassal of the lord and had your fief removed, you couldn’t hold court with your lord AND you basically were penniless with the potential to end up in jail. The entire impeachment process is to separate those two things. That’s why the process is spelled out fully in the Constitution and the execution solely left to Congress to implement.
There entire point of an impeachment is to execute some political justice without having legal justice married to it. What stops anyone from just abusing the process is the process itself and what it indicates for functioning government. If the goal is have no functioning government, then there isn’t anything that stops anyone from abuse. But no functioning government means that those in Congress would lose power, and a loss of power means they become less enticing for lobbyist to enact agendas, for people to seek recourse, and for States to enhance power within the vacuum.
So an abuse of that power would end with them loosing more and more power. This is the same reason why Congress has had a hard time really pinning impeachment and contempt charges and have talked about inherent contempt for Garland (which inherent contempt is basically using Congress to enforce a contempt charge via the Sergeant-at-arms doing the arresting and Congress inventing a “trail” system all of their own outside of the Judicial system… which by the way SCOTUS way back in the 1930s, the last time this was used, indicated that THAT specific instance was not a violation of habeas corpus, but trying to ring Garland up on inherent contempt and trying to put him in Congress jail, would be such a complex process and likely wouldn’t survive a habeas corpus challenge, but who knows at this point? For all we know SCOTUS may be completely cool with Congress tossing people into Congress jail without a proper trail. But of course that brings with it ALL KINDS of ramifications about our Federal government jailing people in a a jail completely ran by Congress and outside the entire legal system, but I digress).
Long story short, all of this stuff is political process. And you do all of this to further a political agenda to the public. But if the public isn’t backing that action, it has the ability to backfire in that entire you don’t get to come back to Congress or you weaken the overall power of the Federal government. So you have to look at the long term goal of anything you want to do with this process. Like the inherent contempt vote got delayed after the first Presidential debate. Biden’s performance was so bad that Republicans feel that they got what they wanted. The whole Garland audio tapes, the GOP wanted them so that they could play back the tapes to the public and show that Biden was losing his marbles. But now since the debate, there’s little reasons for the GOP to go down the tossing Garland into Congress jail and going down a path that’s likely to not play well for anyone except their most harden supporters.
The process limits the process. That’s what prevent the whole “same thing”.
Are we going to replace the court?
I mean, yeah, that’s the goal. SCOTUS has had about a dozen cases that they’ve overturned decades long, and in some cases century long, established rule. One or two per lifetime of a justice is a lot to completely overturn. This court has overturned nearly a dozen long established rulings. The entire point of a justice system is to bring about stability to the political process. Congress answers to the public, and the public can change their mind often, so random laws flying over the place isn’t unusual. SCOTUS is not elected and thus they faintly answer to the public. So they need to have some stability to maintain legitimacy. Even Robert’s talked about this in the ruling that overturned Roe and felt the majority was going too far.
So I think if the court itself is saying that it is ruining their own legitimacy, bringing them up into the political process to answer to these statements the court itself is making is fair game. And I don’t think that’s unfair to mention in that whole process. Judges don’t answer to the public, so justices that massively change the landscape in short orders of time, are shaking the stability they’re supposed to be building. If SCOTUS wants to rewrite the law of the land, it needs to be gradual not as fast as possible.
This is a pretty thoughtful response, I appreciate you taking the time write it. I agree in spirit with what AOC wants to accomplish. Some of those judges (Clarence Thomas) shouldn’t be anywhere near the Supreme Court. My fear is that this plan only works if the impeachments proceeding are successful, they manage to successfully replace the current justices with new ones, AND enact meaningful change in a short period of time to make that a situation like this doesn’t happen again. If they fail at any of these things, then the Republicans, who don’t respect precedent, process, or the rule of law, would just weaponize the impeachments to remove the justices and replace them with their own whenever they get a majority in government.
Process. The same that that puts barriers on this discussion from AOC. The entire impeachment process is the understanding of the people who created this country, to have a political process that is departed from the legal process. That’s why being impeached doesn’t also mean criminally convicted and vice versa. Historically, if you were a vassal of the lord and had your fief removed, you couldn’t hold court with your lord AND you basically were penniless with the potential to end up in jail. The entire impeachment process is to separate those two things. That’s why the process is spelled out fully in the Constitution and the execution solely left to Congress to implement.
There entire point of an impeachment is to execute some political justice without having legal justice married to it. What stops anyone from just abusing the process is the process itself and what it indicates for functioning government. If the goal is have no functioning government, then there isn’t anything that stops anyone from abuse. But no functioning government means that those in Congress would lose power, and a loss of power means they become less enticing for lobbyist to enact agendas, for people to seek recourse, and for States to enhance power within the vacuum.
So an abuse of that power would end with them loosing more and more power. This is the same reason why Congress has had a hard time really pinning impeachment and contempt charges and have talked about inherent contempt for Garland (which inherent contempt is basically using Congress to enforce a contempt charge via the Sergeant-at-arms doing the arresting and Congress inventing a “trail” system all of their own outside of the Judicial system… which by the way SCOTUS way back in the 1930s, the last time this was used, indicated that THAT specific instance was not a violation of habeas corpus, but trying to ring Garland up on inherent contempt and trying to put him in Congress jail, would be such a complex process and likely wouldn’t survive a habeas corpus challenge, but who knows at this point? For all we know SCOTUS may be completely cool with Congress tossing people into Congress jail without a proper trail. But of course that brings with it ALL KINDS of ramifications about our Federal government jailing people in a a jail completely ran by Congress and outside the entire legal system, but I digress).
Long story short, all of this stuff is political process. And you do all of this to further a political agenda to the public. But if the public isn’t backing that action, it has the ability to backfire in that entire you don’t get to come back to Congress or you weaken the overall power of the Federal government. So you have to look at the long term goal of anything you want to do with this process. Like the inherent contempt vote got delayed after the first Presidential debate. Biden’s performance was so bad that Republicans feel that they got what they wanted. The whole Garland audio tapes, the GOP wanted them so that they could play back the tapes to the public and show that Biden was losing his marbles. But now since the debate, there’s little reasons for the GOP to go down the tossing Garland into Congress jail and going down a path that’s likely to not play well for anyone except their most harden supporters.
The process limits the process. That’s what prevent the whole “same thing”.
I mean, yeah, that’s the goal. SCOTUS has had about a dozen cases that they’ve overturned decades long, and in some cases century long, established rule. One or two per lifetime of a justice is a lot to completely overturn. This court has overturned nearly a dozen long established rulings. The entire point of a justice system is to bring about stability to the political process. Congress answers to the public, and the public can change their mind often, so random laws flying over the place isn’t unusual. SCOTUS is not elected and thus they faintly answer to the public. So they need to have some stability to maintain legitimacy. Even Robert’s talked about this in the ruling that overturned Roe and felt the majority was going too far.
So I think if the court itself is saying that it is ruining their own legitimacy, bringing them up into the political process to answer to these statements the court itself is making is fair game. And I don’t think that’s unfair to mention in that whole process. Judges don’t answer to the public, so justices that massively change the landscape in short orders of time, are shaking the stability they’re supposed to be building. If SCOTUS wants to rewrite the law of the land, it needs to be gradual not as fast as possible.
This is a pretty thoughtful response, I appreciate you taking the time write it. I agree in spirit with what AOC wants to accomplish. Some of those judges (Clarence Thomas) shouldn’t be anywhere near the Supreme Court. My fear is that this plan only works if the impeachments proceeding are successful, they manage to successfully replace the current justices with new ones, AND enact meaningful change in a short period of time to make that a situation like this doesn’t happen again. If they fail at any of these things, then the Republicans, who don’t respect precedent, process, or the rule of law, would just weaponize the impeachments to remove the justices and replace them with their own whenever they get a majority in government.