The UN Human Rights Council issued a warning that its independent fact finding mission found that the Supreme Court lacks independence, and therefore cannot be trusted in this matter.
Venezuela's Supreme Court was packed by Hugo Chavez 20 years ago[0]. He expanded the Court from 20 to 32 judges. When he did this, he also filled 5 existing vacancies with new judges. In other words, their Supreme Court is controlled by the Maduro regime.
Interesting. In the past few years, I heard about how expanding the US Supreme Court was a reasonable approach to take. I wonder if proponents were aware of this case in Venezuela.
As with anything, it's all about implementation. The Supreme Court's size fluctuated over time, with different presidents increasing--or decreasing--it, often in response to the Court's actions or the major political disputes of the day. And often for even more partisan reasons than the current arguments for expansion.
John Adams and the Federalist Party reduced the Court from six to five; Jefferson restored the Court to six before expanding it to seven a few years later. Congress bumped it up from seven to nine in 1837, and Lincoln added a tenth during the Civil War. After the war, and at least partially motivated by vacancies that would have offered Andrew Johnson the opportunity to nominate justices who would screw with the Reconstruction plan, Congress reduced the Court from ten to seven. In 1869, Congress increased the Court's size to nine...and nominated two additional justices the very day the Court ruled paper currency--greenbacks--unconstitutional, who would then enable the Court to reverse that decision.
That said, there are non-partisan arguments for expanding the Court. We now have thirteen circuits; historically, each justice was responsible for a circuit but when appeals courts were added, the Supreme Court wasn't expanded. And then there's the expanded use of the shadow docket for more consequential questions. All of that's dramatically increased the Court's workload, and fixing it would probably be preferable...assuming that the act of fixing it didn't cause other issues.
Beyond that, not all of the expansion proposals amount to "add as many as we can." Many of them are tied to other reforms that are meant to lower the perceived stakes of each appointment, and grant a sort of regularity that ought to appeal to both parties without succumbing to what Venezuela current has to deal with.
FDR tried it during his time, wanted to expand it to 13 I think. It didn't work. But what we really need for SCOTUS is time limits and automatic replacements at intervals to take politics out of the process a little bit.
There's a perspective from which FDR's attempt to pack the court did work: He didn't expand the court, but the credible threat that he would do so got the justices to back off on blocking the New Deal policies he was implementing.
We already periodically replace them, that period just happens to be their lifetime. If you shorten that period you lower the stakes if the "other side" gets to fill a slot, you'll get another chance to rebalance in X years, where X is a known value and doesn't require someone to die (or willingly relinquish power).
I am at least. It's "a reasonable approach to take" in that it may be an effective mechanism for accomplishing certain goals like diluting the power currently concentrated there or preventing some specific action the court may take with its current majority.
I don't think there's a framework that can universally tell you whether supreme court expansion is always good in all cases or always bad in all cases. Taking effective action is bad when you do it for bad reasons and good when you do it for good ones. Unsatisfying but there it is.
I personally would not call that a reasonable policy proposal but it is (unfortunately) constitutional due to an oversight by the US Framers in 1787. The appropriate way to stop it from passing would be to vote against politicians who advocate it as they are unfit for office.
Says once self-described as "opposition-leaning-but-not-insane" fwiw.
We in the US have big concerns with their elections and not Saudi elections for some reason. I don't think that it could be fully explained by hemisphere dominance.
Ok , but what do you think about the UN and Carter Center also publishing that the results published by the government are false ?
What do you think about the fact that results by state, county or voting center have not been published after 3 weeks when for every past election they were published by next day ?
The Carter Center never claimed the results were fake. That would be a massive claim. They criticized "short deadlines, relatively few places of registration, and minimal public information", barriers to citizens abroad voting (which skew very heavily anti-Maduro), and "unequal conditions among candidates" (Maduro was much better funded than the opposition). It sums up with:
> In the limited number of polling centers they visited, Carter Center observer teams noted the desire of the Venezuelan people to participate in a democratic election process, as demonstrated through their active participation as polling staff, party witnesses, and citizen observers. However, their efforts were undermined by the CNE's complete lack of transparency in announcing the results.
>The Carter Center: "The records confirm that Edmundo Gonzalez obtained 70% of the votes
They don't say exactly what that headline says. They say is with an 81.7% selection of the total voting records, they agree with an analysis that shows he reached nearly 70% of the vote:
> We reviewed 24,533 tally sheets (collected by opposition witnesses) with 81.7% (of the total voting records), and we agree with the analysis of these records that show that Edmundo González won with nearly 70%, by a 2 to 1 margin
Presumably that's adjusting and extrapolating for the missing data (if it was urban vs rural, etc.)? If it wasn't e.g. already adjusted up from that data to it would definitely be a majority though.
I can easily believe the results published by the Venezuelan government are false.
For the counting stuff I don't know, there have been misleading things with that in the past like in Bolivia where it was just due to the order the results were reported being biased towards one side so it seemed like a dramatic change suddenly happened but didn't really (like in the US 2020 election as well). Weeks seems more extreme and less likely to be something like that though.
What happens or happened in Saudi Arabia doesn't have any bearing on whether this Venezuelan election was won by the incumbent or the opposition based on the voting results (save for any direct intervention by Saudi Arabia which I'm not aware of).
Gross. Let it be a lesson to anyone who thinks it is a good idea to have a judiciary system that is packed to the brim with self-serving, partisan goons who are loyal only to their party.
The lesson is: using the old fasion way of lies, cheating elections, violence, murder and intimidation to stay in power works really well if you're a totalitarian leader? Nobody can stop you and you can do literally anything you want to stay in power?
They're appointed by the National Assembly. Mexico is currently trying to replace their system with one where each judge is democratically elected. Critics are calling this a "power grab" by AMLO though since the judiciary has often been the opposition's main way to check him and his party's ambitions. Almost every federal judge in Mexico is on strike because of this
I'm afraid so. Trump is in "total war" mode because if he loses the election, the court cases are no longer going to be delayed, and he's going to be destroyed. So he's going to claim "voter fraud!" in every state he loses, maybe even in every precinct he loses, and he's going to file a blizzard of cases. It's not going to be 60 cases this time; it's going to be a lot more. Most of them are going to be dismissed, like last time, due to lack of anything that looks like evidence.
But he also may have some state election people who are willing to march to his orders. That part concerns me a lot. And he probably has a fair number of people who will take to the streets to "stop the second steal". And I fear that he's going to try to use them.
TBH if that's the totality of the battle plan, that'll be fantastic news. The "stolen election" ruse only came so close to working last time because he had his hands on the levers of executive power, and could thus disable/sideline all of the usual law enforcement while fighting it out in the court of public opinion (what the baseless court cases were for).
But really the only way we're going to get out of this societal catastrophe is for Trumpism to be resoundingly rebuked at the ballot box. The Republican party needs to choke on the inevitable results of this festering radical populist destruction that they had been stoking but containing for decades (eg rush Limbaugh), until it finally escaped.
And please don't read my comment thinking I'm sitting here positively pro-Democrat or pro-system. As a libertarian, I've got many indictments of the current corporatist anti-individual-freedom system, the two party duopoly, the "deep state", etc. But staring down the choice of the destruction of the American bureaucracy in favor of cult of personality autocracy, I've begrudgingly had to support the solidly conservative option of the bureaucracy. And I'm willing to admit that it had been far too easy to take it for granted.
Don't be naive. The similarities are superficial--mustachioed, middle-aged, male--and they can all be attributed to the United States' history of intervening in the politics of Latin American countries--a la the "Monroe Doctrine"--often installing leaders who are friendly to American business interests, but monstrous as leaders.
When the US fails to get their man in charge, we then engage in propaganda campaigns to demonize the democratically elected alternatives, manufacturing consent for further interference.
Either way, there are always news clips demonizing Latin American leaders, and so video games can safely use this trope to create a villain that doesn't piss off any of its American market.
What other play he has for prooving how much he won the election? Asking Puting to prove the results? Have a North Korean child song sing about his glorious win? Need to build a wall forming 'I won!' visible from space? Have his win being tatooed on each newborns forehead in Venezuela? Why does he need this kind of grandiose validation if he thinks the facts and the people are behind him? Oh! That's why, because it is not true. Well, sorry Maduro, you are a looser only kept alive by your mercenarys. For now.
https://x.com/UN_HRC/status/1826624015097888919