When it’s all said and done, Americans will have to find the courage to admit the Judicial branch was an utter failure. That whole thing was supposed to be immune to political coercion. I say it will take courage because it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution, and that it’s infallible. It’s a massive failure through and through.
The founding fathers did not protect the branches from each other nearly enough, and certainly did not give the people an end-run mechanism to bypass and fix it.
> it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution
Article III is light in describing the courts [1]. Our judicial system is mostly a creature of Congress, not the Constitution.
I’m personally a fan of choosing by lot, from the appellate bench, a random slate of justices for each case. (That court of rotating judges would be the one in which “the judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested”.) You could do this entirely through legislation—nothing in the Constitution requires lifetime appointments to a permanent bench.
The problem is that the executive appoints the lower court judges, so the pool is tainted. A solution to this is probably something everyone needs to start thinking about (the whole problem), because a future democrat or sane republican will need to push a reform onto the court. Biden tried to push term limits before he left. Trump is a pen tester and showed all the cracks, so there's going to have to be a massive repair job of our systems.
> problem is that the executive appoints the lower court judges
President nominates judges; he doesn’t appoint without the Senate.
Moreover, “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments,” a category that includes “Judges of the Supreme Court” [1]. The Congress may, by statute alone, remove the President’s power to appoint SCOTUS justices.
There's a lot that went wrong with the American experiment.
1. The electoral college, which removes voting power from people who live in populated areas in favor of people who don't.
2. A system of governance that doesn't require coalitions and thus also stimulates a 2 party system.
3. No mechanism for federal legislation to occur through solely the actions of the voters. There should be a way for American voters to check the government through a legislative process that allows items to be put on the national ballots outside of congress and the president.
4. If every branch is meant to check every other branch, each branch should have an enforcement arm, so that if they're ignored, physical action can be taken.
The founding fathers did not protect the branches from each other nearly enough, and certainly did not give the people an end-run mechanism to bypass and fix it.