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So it is the system's fault for allowing this. Why not make the system so that the president or the ruling party alone cannot appoint the supreme court justices.
I mean I only spent 5 minutes thinking about this, but why not make the appointments work the same way they vote for laws? I.e. both parties, not individuals, have to vote and get a majority to appoint, and only in emergency situations could anyone appoint a justice without a vote.
The same should be done for appointing the highest attorneys in the country.
How fucking stupid is it to allow the ruling party to control the justice system. It's just asking to be abused by fascists.
Law should be politically impartial.
No system will long survive players acting in bad faith. There's no system you can come up with that is immune to conservatives and capitalists fucking with it. It might take them years, but they will never stop. They are the worst people on earth. If you could thanos-snap away conservatives, the world would become a better place overnight. Every problem we're facing is either their fault, or made worse by them.
And we're never going to get rid of conservatives. There are always going to be shitty humans who believe their in-group needs to be protected and the out-group needs to be bound. Shitty, scared, little shit bags that will blame brown people or queers or whatever, anything, so they can think down familiar paths and avoid any hard introspection.
So I don't know. You don't stop building a home because the elements are always trying to tear it down. But you can't punch the wind in the fucking throat so hard they cry and vomit at the same time, so maybe it's not quite the same as a maga hat.
Political impartiality is a myth. All actors have motives and biases. We should strive to build a robust system that has the fail-safes to prevent bad actors from doing things like:
A fair system is not an apolitical one, it is a very political one, with strong convictions and ideals about the rights of its citizens, such that they are unalienable.
We already require the President and Senate to agree to appoint a Justice. The problem there is the Senate gives each state equal representation with no regard to their population (this has been an issue since before the country was a country) and there's absolutely no way that enough rural states are going to vote to change that system.
The president can nominate anyone, but they have to be approved by the senate. Every justice we had made it through that process, most before they scrapped the filibuster.
Legislation doesn't have to have support from both parties either. The filibuster rule makes it possible for a minority party to hold up certain things, but there is no requirement that anything be supported by both parties.
And even if we did have a system where a majority of both parties was required to approve a judicial appointment or attorney, that would just break the system even more. It would give a veto to the Republicans for every appointment regardless of which party is in the majority and they would gladly leave half the government vacant when they don't hold the white house, or make such extreme demands that it wouldn't matter which party the president belongs to. This would just give the most extreme group more power to grind the government to a halt and hold the whole system hostage.
Yes, they should be. Unfortunately, those laws can only be written, enacted, interpreted, administered and enforced by people. Laws have no power on their own. And we have to have a process for determining who is in a position to oversee those laws. Some of those people are elected. Some are appointed. Some are hired or promoted independently within organizations that answer to elected and/or appointed officials. And there is necessarily a trade off when balancing power between elected officials (who are going to be the most politicized but also the ones who are answerable to the people directly) and those who are more independent (who can be less vulnerable to momentary political currents but also never have to answer to the general public).
As I said, there are many flaws in the American system, some of which are very big. But we also have numerous mechanisms that should prevent situations like this. The problem is they all require someone to do their fucking job and push back. Many of those furthest removed from electoral politics have been doing a lot to uphold legal and ethical standards. But when the elected officials and their appointees at the highest levels are either actively undermining the law or simply failing to do their duty to defend the law, it isn't the law that's at fault.