First — there is no such thing as The Supreme Court. The Constitution, Article III, says, “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, …”

NOTICE: Article III is *not* about the non-existent The Supreme Court; rather, it is about “The judicial Power of the United States”. The adjective ‘supreme’ in the term “one supreme Court” could as well be ‘superior’, for its function is to distinguish the single top-level court from whatever inferior courts that the Congress may choose to establish.

Second — as Frederick has already pointed out, the Constitution *explicitly* gives the Congress authority to set and regulate the jurisdiction of the federal courts … including, excepting certain limited jurisdiction spelled out in the document, that of the high court.

Third — the standard for impeachment (and removal) of judges is exactly and whatever the controlling legislative bodies want it to be. If the Congress were to impeach Ginsburg and remove her from office — as it should — for her betrayal of the office (*), no one has the authority to gainsay Congress on the matter.

(*) they are many, but in my opinion, one of the worst is her pronouncement that US justices ought to “consult” foreign law in imposing their wills upon the nation. The NYT from 2005 — https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/politics/justice-ginsburg-backs-value-of-foreign-law.html

Frederick: “This is not actually true. Congress, under Article III, has the power to set limits to what the Supreme Court may hear …”

Frederick, you are the first person I have encountered who *gets* the point. Most people — even those who loathe leftist judicial activism — bitterly resent having this truth spoken and will generally engage in illogic (including ad honinem non-arguments) in their resistence to grasping the truth.

The left-leaning justices are noticeably more consistent in their leftism than the right-leaning justices are in their conservatism.

There are 2 justices on the court who’re 100% reliably right-leaning (Alito and Thomas). The next (Gorsuch) is too new to be certain, but he looks good so far; call him 90% reliably conservative. After that, we have Roberts, who has famously back-stabbed conservatives on a couple of important cases, but in other ways seems conservative. Call him 70% reliable.

The four leftist justices are all 100% reliable leftists. Without Anthony Kennedy, then, what do we have?

THE RIGHT HAS:
100% of Thomas
100% of Alito
90% of Gorsuch
70% of Roberts

THE LEFT HAS:
100% of Ginsburg
100% of Breyer
100% of Sotomayor
100% of Kagan
10% of Gorsuch
30% of Roberts

Thats 360% for the Right, 440% for the Left.

It’s currently a Left-Slanted Court, by an 80% gap.

And it already was a Left-Slanted Court when Kennedy — a 60%/40% weathercock of a man — was in there, too.

Now Trump gets to nominate a replacement for Kennedy, and his desire, it seems, is to get a 100% conservative in place.

But even if he does, that will give conservatives only a slight edge: It will be 460% for the Right, 440% for the Left.

And new Justices nominated by Republican presidents are notoriously apt to judge farther-to-the-left than initially expected.

Just ask Nixon, who put Stevens on the court. Or Reagan, who gave us O’Connor and Kennedy. Or Bush 41, who gave us Souter. Or Bush 43, who gave us Roberts.

The correct way to view a new Justice nominated by a Republican president, initially, is as a 75% conservative, 25% leftist. That accounts for the uncertainty. Then you adjust your percentage over time, as he/she proves more or less reliable. (Tracking a justice’s record within a five-year-scrolling window of time, weighting the most-important cases most-heavily, is a good approach.)

The safest bet for a new Justice nominated by a Democrat president, of course, is that he/she is a 100% reliable leftist.

TO SUM UP:
The court is currently left-of-center.

If Trump’s nominee is confirmed, time will tell whether the court swings right-of center.

But even a 100% reliable conservative will give the court only the narrowest glaze of a conservative majority.

And the safer bet is that we wind up with a perfectly-divided court, or possibly a slightly-narrowed leftist majority, because Roberts, Gorsuch, or the Unknown New Justice turn out not to be as-expected.

All this cataclysmic “Roe will be overturned!!!” discussion is mere Chicken-Little-ism from the Left, and from the Right, it’s like counting your chickens before you’re half-finished building a coop.

Talk to me again, when…
(a.) the nominee replacing Kennedy has proven themselves 80%+ reliably conservative over 5+ years of cases;
(b.) the next person to retire is a leftist justice; and,
(c.) the person replacing that leftist justice turns out to be 80%+ reliably conservative over 3+ years of cases.

THAT’S when it’ll be time to break out the champagne.

But just NOW, it’s too early to tell.

https://www.redstate.com/dhorowitz3/2013/08/13/mark-levins-liberty-amendments/

“The Judiciary was never meant to be an all-powerful institution in which five men in robes have the final say over every major policy battle in the country. In order to end judicial tyranny, Levin proposes limiting service to one 12-year term, and granting both Congress and the state legislatures the authority to overturn court decisions with the vote of three-fifths of both houses of Congress or state legislative bodies.”

—

I’m also happy to see so many people here spelling “rein” correctly, instead of using the homophone “reign”, which means something completely different. It’s gotten to the point where I see the incorrect version almost exclusively.

Merits aside, I write separately to address the remedy that the plaintiffs sought and obtained in this case. The District Court imposed an injunction that barred the Government from enforcing the President’s Proclamation against anyone, not just the plaintiffs. Injunctions that prohibit the Executive Branch from applying a law or policy against anyone—often called “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions—have become increasingly common.

District courts, including the one here, have begun imposing universal injunctions without considering their authority to grant such sweeping relief. These injunctions are beginning to take a toll on the federal court system— preventing legal questions from percolating through the federal courts, encouraging forum shopping, and making every case a national emergency for the courts and for the Executive Branch. I am skeptical that district courts have the authority to enter universal injunctions. These injunctions did not emerge until a century and a half after the founding. And they appear to be inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts. If their popularity continues, this Court must address their legality.

This is not actually true. Congress, under Article III, has the power to set limits to what the Supreme Court may hear:

…the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.

They just don’t bother.

As US keeps (sadly) becoming more and more of a Latin-American country, the country faces common problems that have happened for years in Latin-America. One of them is judges placing politics over the rule of law.

Actually, Germanic and (specially) British system are quite loose ones, since they work on the basis of people having high standards. The moment people (judges included) don’t have those standards anymore, you need to start to limit their independence and keep them on short leash.

Of course, that easily slides into partially totalitarian regimes where judges are controlled by the government, which is a endemic problem in Latin-American countries. It’s quite a unstable system. When A society loses their standards, the price to pay is TERRIBLE.

One intermediate tactic might be to stop packing the court with Ivy grads. Some of the worst people attend Harvard and Yale, because it is the path to power via appointment.

The study of Anglo-American constitutional law is that of the liberties of the people. Neither a body of dry technicalities, as the demagogue is prone to consider it, nor an instrument new created in the year 1787 and now but an inconvenient impediment to the national destiny, our own Constitution registers the totality of those principles which, in eight hundred and forty years of struggle, the Saxon peoples have won back again from Norman kings, the common law from Roman conceptions of a Sovereign State; each rising wave of freedom leaving its record in some historic document, then perhaps to recede again until the next flood left a higher record still. And if to the Mother Country is due the invention of the Constitution as a bulwark of the people against the Executive, to our forefathers belongs the glory of protecting the people against the Legislative as well; and against the usurpations of any Government or law, even of their own making, on that irreducible minimum which time has shown to be necessary to the English-American people for freedom as they understand it. Give them less than this and they will fight.

–THE CONSTITUTION AND THE PEOPLE’S LIBERTIES, F. J. STIMSON. (1907)

Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America Aug 1, 2006

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Men+In+Black

Concise.

A good reason to leave these matters to Congress is that legislators may more directly consider the competing interests at stake. Unlike this Court, Congress has the flexibility to address these questions in a wide variety of ways. As we have said in other dormant Commerce Clause cases, Congress “has the capacity to investigate and analyze facts beyond anything the Judiciary could match.”

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/585/17-494/dissent6.html

The sales tax decision was especially wrong headed in my opinion. The result will be unending hardship for small businesses who sell across state lines. The conservative justices made a political decision because of who owns Amazon instead of leaving it to elected legislators. It is every bit as political as the same sex marriage case the liberals decided.

For all the hysteria surrounding SCOTUS appointments, with arguments made by conservatives that liberal justices legislate from the bench, here are two cases where the Chief Justice refused to go along with the conservatives and legislate from the bench, and in the process he becomes a turncoat. I would say he made the correct decision, if you are going to limit the power of unelected judges.