Watch the full episode here: https://novara.media/johnsonsbiggamble
Breaking Down Ted Cruz’s Plan for Supreme Court ‘Retention Elections’
Most important of all, at a time when Republicans find winning 270 electoral votes in a presidential race challenging, how could conservatives be sure that the justices they prefer — Scalia, Thomas, Alito — would be retained under this proposal?
He says Cruz had been contemplating the issue of reining in judges who read their personal ideological preferences into the Constitution for a long time, and this is only one of several options he’s examining.
.. “If the federal judiciary were to borrow a structural element from the states, I’d go with term limits rather than retention elections,” Shapiro says, pointing to a plan proposed by Steve Calabresi, one of the founders of the Federalist Society, to institute staggered 18-year terms for Supreme Court justices, with a new vacancy arising every two years. That system would guarantee each president two appointments, and end the practice of justices remaining on the court for three decades or more.
After what von Spakovsky calls “the worst week of Supreme Court decisions I can remember since I’ve been in Washington,” the standard claim of GOP presidential candidates that grassroots conservatives need to elect them to ensure the nomination of strict constructionists no longer holds water.
.. Republicans “should only nominate individuals who have proven they are conservatives in hard fights in court, in academia, and in the public square, and have stood up to attacks and the kind of unfair, low-handed criticism that is typical of the mean, vicious Left, and have not backed down.”