Justice Elena Kagan declined Thursday to outright answer the question of whether Congress could impose an ethics code on the Supreme Court, but she did allow that it could do “various things” to regulate the high court.
“It just can’t be that the court is the only institution that is somehow not subject to any checks and balances from anybody else,” she said, adding, “I mean, we are not imperial.”
“We, too, are part of a checks and balances system,” she said.
my own country doesn’t have absolute democracy, but when I read things about the American Supreme Court it just seems so crazy, so much absolute power held by so few. Incredibly easy to influence and corrupt and their decisions are so wide ranging and impactful. It has no place in a democracy in the form that America does it.
make it a few hundred Justices that all vote and you have something closer to the UK’s house of Lords, unelected and corruptible, but it’s much harder to corrupt hundreds than three.
The Idea behind the American SC was that their life long appointment would eliminate the need to be corrupt as they (theoretically) wouldn’t have the ‘pro quo’ part of ‘quid pro quo’ to corrupt them. In reality, that doesn’t seem to work calling into question the necessity of term limits and of course corruption checking.
Packing the court to a few hundred justices isn’t really necessary as it would just be more like the US Senate which does exist.
But I agree, they seem to have too much power as is.
Packing the court to a few dozen and having the justices rotate randomly would do a lot to prevent corruption. Nobody would know which justices are going to hear their case and there would be more justices to bribe. Do both of those together and we’re most of the way to restoring the court’s legitimacy.
The house of lords actually served as the highest court before the supreme court was introduced