The Constitution was written during a difficult time in communications and that is why the the Senate was chosen to elect the Supreme Court. Today I really believe that the majority should elect the members of the Supreme Court so that they represent the maximun amount of people not a party.

It is still OK to make it better.

@Marine It sure is. It is fascinating, though, that a 'founding father' recognized its imperfections and the reality of its finite existence.

@beenthere It is what they were living through and wisely chose to eliminate.

@Marine Maybe not quite enough. I've often wondered what they would have changed if they could see today's monster.

There have been many that sided with either side at a particular time.

@Marine if a judges daughter is raped and murdered by say a biker do you think he would be unbias if a biker came up in front of him for rape and murder? im not picking on bikers you understand.

@LeighShelton Fry him

In a sense, the Supreme Court is a nine person jury.

@Rob1948 Yes but not a random seletion from all parts of society, and nine is not even as good a sample as twelve. Such numbers are riddiculus in mathematical terms.

@Fernapple uhmmm given the importance of their function you would NOT want a random selection of people serving that function. Justices must make decisions based on the laws and the Constitution. Their efforts are often highly technical and require a great deal of knowledge.

Just as you don’t want a random selection of my peers doing that job you don’t want a random selection of my peers performing surgery on you. (My peers include doctors and lawyers, but you still don’t want a random selection operating on you or deciding your legal fate.) Imagine what a random selection of people off the streets would be like.

@Rob1948 Yes but the justices can still do all the speaking and present the case, the jury just votes to make it law or not. This way the body becomes accoutable, and you can give the justices an extra power if you like to send any case not passed by the jury to congress or referendum.

@Fernapple it does not work that way. It would make the Court less powerful and subservient to Congress when the intent was for it to be equal. What you suggest would insert more politics into the process.

@Rob1948 No it would not be politics but democracy which is the opposite of politics. And why not replace Congress with a jury as well?

@Fernapple Congress is already political. Any selection process for a jury will be prone to politics once you start vetting the candidates for suitability. And, as I noted, the process you suggest will completely destroy the co-equal basis of the USOC. Plus, the jury will not have requisite knowledge. Finally, if you did have a jury, what is the purpose of having 9 justices.

@Rob1948 Therre should be no vetting that is the whole point of a jury, the vetting of juries is something which is only done in the courts becausethe sample size is too small and juries are allowed to debate, as I said such juries should be at least tree hundred strong if not a thousand, modern countries can afford such minor costs.. The 9 justices job would be to debate and explain.

@Fernapple you really don’t understand how courts operate, do you.

OK, let’s suppose, we somehow select a thousand jury members... take them away from their homes and jobs for some period of time. We don’t get them. They come like they are, with whatever biases they have.

Now let’s assume that Joe Blow is fighting the Giant Corporation over a technical application of the law involved in patents for super jigger mobile phone communications. Joe Blow paid his lawyers and Giant Corporation paid their lawyer all the way through the appeals courts. Suddenly they are at the Supreme Court. And, you want 9 Justices to argue the case for the parties. A case they just got, and aren’t overly familiar with, to a jury of 1000 people who don’t have a clue what the case is about or means or its impact on the hundreds and thousands of patents that deal with similar issues.

Seriously?

If this had be tried in the 60s when civil rights laws started hitting the courts, on in the 50s when cases in Tennessee and Arkansas dealing with school integration, I doubt you could have found a jury that would have supported school integration or civil rights laws. They were hugely unpopular laws and rulings.

What you are suggesting is unwieldy, expensive and largely unworkable. Justices don’t sit on the SCOTUS bench and just rule. They listen to the litigants, read their pleadings, research the technical and legal issues and then debate among themselves. Finally, they write opinions which are binding as a matter of law.

A jury such as you propose can not do that. Please, if you want to rewrite the basis for the Supreme Court and it’s functions and how it fits into our system of governance, at least understand the system we have and the consequences of the changes you propose.

I know you like the idea, but you need to understand the how such a system would work and the resulting consequences as well as the reason for SCOTUS and how it fits into our government. You also need to understand why no large government body uses a pure democracy model for governance. And, instead why democratic governments use a representative or parliamentary form or similar.

@Rob1948 The consequences of a very inexpensive idea, especially if you go for only two or three hundred on the jury, (who would be well rewarded) are that the government is held to be more immediately accountable, which forces it to do a better job as well as reducing politics. And no I do not know the details of US government very well, if you look at my profile you will see that I am from the UK. But I do know that representative democracy world wide is simply an outdated hangover from the days of horse drawn carriages, when only the rich and privileged could afford to travel to the seat of government. In the age of rail and even more today in the digital age it is an out dated anachronism.

The details of reform are not that important, I only throw that forward as a token. The problem is that if counties such as Europe and the US do not move forward and improve their democracy, they will loose the lead they have in democracy. When that happens they will then loose the lead they have in everything else, since military, economic, social and intellectual leaderships all depend on democracy. This is the thinking of the third world pseudo-republic, defering democratic reform until state security and economic success has been achieved first, without understanding that those two follow from the first, not the other way round. As without those, people will not feel that they, and the things they value, are safe and involved, and therefore they will not invest, pursue enterprise or even reside in those countries. The world has always been led in all by those states which were brave enough to lead in terms of democracy, and every civilization which declined did so for many different reasons, but in every case the rise of unaccountable government was the main factor in their inability to rise to the challenges before them.

And yes the people, if trusted with more responsibility, will make mistakes, big ones in the short term at least, but inclusion is the only way they will learn. They will not learn if they are excluded from government, since without that there is no reason for them to do so, and they can happily be irresponsible where there are no real consequences. The current rise of anti-intellectualism in the US and Europe is a direct consequence of exclusion, and it will increase and have dire effects down the line.

As to the difficulty of making the law explainable, well I am sorry but that is just something that has to be faced, and it is the incompetence in government which leads to complexity which is one of the things that immediate accountability is meant to address.

At the end of the day the sampling of public oppinon will not get you the best policies, but it will get better and more intellegent policies for the purpose of serving the public good, which the public are the best able to judge, than trusting small gangs who will grow increasingly corrupt as the years go by and are only accountable in a nominal way every few years.

@Fernapple look, if you want to tell us how to form parts of our government, at least do us the courtesy of understand how it’s structured, why it’s structured the way it is, how that works for us and what impacts all that has. In particular, you need to understand how the federal court system is structure, why and how it works. And, please do that first.

What you suggest is simply not workable here.

Put it another way, how would you feel if someone, not from the UK came in and Told you how to run the UK when it’s oaifully obvious they do not have ANY understanding about how the UK government works.

@Rob1948 Yes I generally do not get into politics on this site for that reason, because it is mainly US. But I did freely admit that I knew little of its workings and was only looking at general principles. But you are more than welcome to comment on the workings of British politics if you wish any input is useful especially an outsiders.

@Fernapple other than casual observations about what I see in the news (for the life of me, I can not understand why you would want to leave the EU), I don’t know enough about the parliamentary form of government in the UK to comment.

But, thanks for the offer.

Elect the Supreme Court. Is your memory that short? Those people you want to elect Supreme Court Justices elected Donald Trump.

Elections ensure partisan Justices. Worse, unless they are required to meet certain minimum requirements for legal competency, we could get a Justice Trump.

@Rob1948 They also elected Ike Kennedy Obama Teddy and many others.

@Marine times change. One rotten apple and a couple of bruised apples is pretty good in 230 or so years. But, I would not trust them with making SCOTUS even more political than it currently is.