Republicans want to turn the courts into a subsidiary of the GOP. They're starting to succeed.
IAN MILLHISER
FEB 9, 2018, 8:00 AM
Pennsylvania state Rep. Cris Dush (R) is prepared to destroy his state’s judiciary to preserve Republican control of Congress.
Last month, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court voted 5-2 to declare the state’s congressional maps unconstitutional — maps under which Republicans won 13 of the state’s 18 congressional seats even in years when Democrats won a majority of the statewide popular vote. In response to the court’s decision, Dush proposed impeaching and removing all five of the justices in the majority.
At least for the moment, Dush’s proposal does not appear to be gaining steam with his colleagues, or with the state’s Republican leadership. But that doesn’t mean Republican leaders are quietly acquiescing to the rule of law. Last week, lawyers for Pennsylvania Senate President pro tempore Joseph Scarnati (R) informed the state supreme court that Scarnati refuses to comply with a court order requiring him to turn over data the court needs to evaluate new congressional maps.
Joey Betz, 19, joins protestors demonstrating outside the Pennsylvania Capitol Building before electors arrive to cast their votes from the election at December 19, 2016 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)
Pennsylvania Republican launches effort to impeach state supreme court to save GOP gerrymander
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Ordinarily, when a party to litigation refuses to comply with a court order, judges have a very effective way to break this impasse. Courts can hold the recalcitrant party in contempt, impose escalating fines, and even jail an individual until they come around to the view that they should follow the court’s order after all.
But this power to hold individuals in contempt rests on the premise that courts are more powerful than the parties that would defy them. Dush’s impeachment proposal allows Republicans to flip the script.
Despite the fact that Pennsylvania is closely divided between Democratic and Republican voters, Republicans enjoy a two-thirds supermajority in the state senate, enough to remove a justice. If the state supreme court holds defiant GOP leaders in contempt, Republicans can retaliate with impeachment.
Even if no one is ever actually removed from office, the threat of an impeachment crisis places the rule of law on weaker footing.
The Pennsylvania GOP’s attack on the judiciary is hardly an isolated incident. While Pennsylvania Republicans ramp up for a dramatic clash with their state’s judiciary, Republicans in other states and in Washington, D.C. are quietly transforming the judiciary into a haven for conservative movement loyalists.
Forbidden tactics are on the table again
Steven Calabresi is one of the most influential people in America that you’ve probably never heard of.
A professor at Northwestern University’s law school and, more significantly, the chairman of the Federalist Society’s board of directors, Calabresi is one of the puppet masters behind the most influential legal organization in the United States.
As a candidate, Donald Trump pledged that his judicial nominees would all be “picked by the Federalist Society.” A Federalist Society executive acted “as Trump’s subcontractor on the selection of [Supreme Court appointment Neil] Gorsuch,” according to the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin.
So Calabresi kicked off a firestorm last year when he offered a radical proposal to neutralize liberals in the federal judiciary.
In a memo that was briefly posted to a public website last fall and then taken down after it was widely criticized, Calabresi and a former student proposed doubling or even tripling the number of seats on the United States Courts of Appeals. These new appeals court judges would be joined by 185 new trial judges. And all of these seats would be filled by Donald Trump. Calabresi’s memo was not shy about one of its primary motives for such a massive expansion of the federal bench: “undoing the judicial legacy of President Barack Obama.”
Chairman of conservative group with major role in picking Trump judicial nominees proposes court-packing scheme.
They aren't even being subtle.
For decades, court-packing — that is, expanding the size of a court for the very purpose of changing its ideological makeup — has been considered the ultimate nuclear tactic in a battle for control over the judiciary.
When President Franklin Roosevelt proposed adding six justices to the Supreme Court of the United States in order to neutralize a Court that frequently struck down progressive laws under dubious constitutional theories, it sparked immediate opposition from key lawmakers — and was widely considered a disastrous turning point for Roosevelt.
Read more
https://thinkprogress.org/gop-war-judicial-independence-b4a306122cca/
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