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James Fallows's avatar

This is a "comment" from me, J. Fallows. Back in the olden days of blogging, I would run extensive "reader-mail" threads. I will probably re-launch such threads here. For a moment, here is a "reader mail" installment inserted as a comment.

The message below came from a person who is a graduate of the same law school as Clarence Thomas, Bret Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, and Sonya Sotomayor. Like all of them, this person has been a senior Senate-confirmed government official, exercising significant power; people would recognize the name. Unlike Clarence Thomas and other fellow Yale Law grads, this person lacks life tenure.

I'll helpfully narrow it down: This is not Hillary Clinton.

Here is this person's contribution:

"The key is to delegitimize the Court, to take it down many notches.

"Packing it or reducing length of terms are ways to rebalance and then still use it to create (out of thin air say the Rs) and enforce rights. This is missing the point.

"We want to reduce the power of the Court to define how we live and how we organize with law the systems of power and entrenched wealth. So it's much more important, e.g., that the Court have an ethics code than that it have term limits, which of course are a good idea.

"It's much more important that the Court have reduced jurisdiction and be generally in disrepute than that its current members only (!!) get to serve another eighteen years."

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I think the "in disrepute" part is taking care of itself, thanks significantly to the Thomas family. The argument about broader challenge to the court's hyper-elevated status is something I hadn't thought about so clearly; I appreciate my correspondent laying it out this way.

In the "coulda been a contender" spirit, I once was planning to attend this same law school. Better all around that I didn't, and that people like my correspondent did.

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janinsanfran's avatar

Well helpful along with Ezra Klein's podcast with Larry Fisher where they discuss that we have not always viewed the Court as such an all-determining, Olympian institution.

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