People, Personas, and Politics 20 – The Supreme Court
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): People, Personas, and Politics
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/08
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Rick Rosner: After the Supreme Court thing, which was a bold denial of Obama’s ability to nominate a Supreme Court justice and have that justice voted on, plus a bunch of other stuff, I have been wondering whether representative democracy in America is irretrievably broken, but first let’s talk about the justices, people like to say that Gorsuch is 49-years-old and may get 39 years on the bench.
The average age of the last 10 Supreme Court justices to leave the Supreme Court has been 87 years. So if he holds to that average, he will be on until 2048. But that ignores advances in medical science. He could easily get 45 or 50 years on the bench if not more. I don’t know. If people start living to 120, 130. I don’t know whether they will change the rules to the court. There will be a bunch of other stuff going on.
That will be disruptive of democratic traditions. So maybe, justices serving for 80 years, starting when they’re 50 and going until they’re 130. I don’t know if that will be an achieved weirdness of the system. But whether the system is completely broken and whether it can be fixed, we’ve had two of the last 3 presidents. They didn’t win the popular vote. They got fewer votes than their opponents. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016.
Trump lost by the popular vote, by 2.8 million. And the Senate and House, one of them – if you look at the number of people, anyway – the House is strongly Republican, and has a number of representatives. I believe more people voted for house democratic candidates than republicans.
Even though, two of the last three presidents did not win the popular vote, at least Bush in his first election didn’t. Things didn’t get really bad until Red Map.
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