Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
The Constitution gives Congress the authority to rewrite the appellate power of the SCOTUS at will. This is within the framework of the Founders. As are Constitutional amendments, which we will also need. Right now, the courts are more powerful than they have ever been, the SCOTUS especially.
The Court in theory has ultimate authority over both branches since it could at a whim call any piece of legislature or presidential act unconstitutional. Such is the power of judicial review, it is a powerful weapon and its use or abuse rest solely on the character of the men and women on the bench. Going back to your moderate proposal, there is nothing preventing the SCOTUS from exercising the same degree of power it does today by setting up a structure of rotating chairs every 4 years.
If we implement the more radical approach and devolve the power to cross-circuit panels all we have done is shift the battle one level down. The Republicans are already packing the appellate courts with unqualified hacks, mostly from vacancies deliberately left open by obstruction during Obama's terms. The issue from the left to me seems to be the inherent power of judicial review, not the structure in which wielded.

Taney Court. Reconstruction era. Lochner Court. It is flat out wrong to claim that "tempers all manners of reform, not just the left." It's factually, historically wrong.
It's not factually wrong, I am just being a bit disingenuous by ignoring the fact that the United States started as a semi-aristocratic, slave endorsing political entity. Most reform measures over the last 200 years were 'liberal' or 'leftist' due to the nature of the country and the trajectory of the political zeitgeist of the 19th and 20th centuries.

As an aside, I would definitely consider gay marriage a conservative reform. Bans on gay marriage only took off in the late 1970s with the rise of political evangelicals in the Republican Party. Before then, there were no laws on the books stating yes or no for most states. The obstruction prior to the 1970s was social, not legal in nature (from my understanding). Constitutional bans among the states only really emerged in 2003 after Mass. legalized it. Despite being a clear platform of the Republican Party, Kennedy was a good judge and called it for what it was (although the reasoning to get there was a bit wonky from what I have read).


I don't like this mindset. Employ the right norms, the mannered pretense, and the substance doesn't matter even if it's the same either way. You suggest the "checks" we need are a return to the old normative political discourse - except those are exactly the checks that have failed. Pretending not to be political is not what keeps Trump from seizing all power, that's the basic structure of government and American society - but even those restraints have been steadily eroded. Checks on Trump, the Republican Party, future authoritarians - those involve real change, not a patina of "civility" between elite stagehands.
Most of what we considered "checks" were actually norms and norms erode. Codification of the norms (through a means more permanent than the House/Senate's internal 'rules') could force a return to twentieth century discourse or foster innovation among state policies due to Federal inaction. At the very least, the failure of codifying norms provides legitimacy to your notion of vanguard politics, since any of the radical proposals you suggest at this point of time will be seen as inherently political in intent and tyrannical in nature.

That's not the choice before us and you know it. How about, fucking around with the courts is on the path where we avoid either a left-wing or right-wing dictator? Not only do we have the opportunity to improve the institutions we have, but we must if we expect to avert or mitigate disaster. Stop thinking an institution is sound as it is just because it can be labeled with the word "institution".
I have no issues with improving what we have, but the reality is that there is always, always a gap between what is needed and what can be reasonably accomplished. The US was able to advance an internal policy of containment towards slavery through several distasteful compromises in the early to mid 19th century. The compromises bought time and curtailed the ability of slavery to grow west by trading territories and Senate seats, these compromises allowed the north to become more powerful than its southern neighbors, so that when the abolitionist movement grew impatient in the 1950s and went for the kill, the US had the internal strength to purge slavery by force. A Civil War circa 1820 or 1790 would have been a guaranteed dissolution of the union.

And how will engagement come about? The schema at least is simple: mass appeal and mobilization with a vanguard policy and political cohort. You need both. You need a popular, straightforward, agenda, and the meritorious and audacious policy to satisfy it and advance it to the next stage. Passing laws and putting them into effect is more important than playing nice with Republicans who couldn't care less about it.
Yes, and I agree with all of this. Again, I feel we may be talking past each other here. It's not the need for reform I am opposing, but the degree to which the left can push the electorate at large, and the conservatives for that matter while still maintaining legitimacy. Shoot too high and you will all too easily be painted as the US version of Latin American style socialism.


(Just to be clear, no president has really overtly defied the courts, though they have criticized them. The examples of Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR, as we discussed a few months ago, involve the courts proactively avoiding offending the government or enjoining them to act or not act in a specific way, for that purpose of maintaining their institutional integrity.)

I agree with you here. Everything a revamped Democratic Party/progressive movement does has to be telegraphed, explained, and justified to the public. 'If we have these votes, we will pass this law. If the courts do X under Y, we will respond with Z.' That means setting out a great deal in advance, but reducing it to the simplest and most digestible components (e.g. you deserve healthcare, education, economic security, etc.). See

"mass appeal and mobilization with a vanguard policy and political cohort. You need both. You need a popular, straightforward, agenda, and the meritorious and audacious policy to satisfy it and advance it to the next stage."

One of the desirable aspects of vanguardism is also of course a unified message from the top.
No disagreement on this. Do you have to use the word vanguardism though? Are you pushing for a Leninist revolution?